Do they do cartoons and nick names for the 14 states with worse death numbers than Florida? Of course they don't. DeSantis Derangement Syndrome is a real illness.
Those Florida numbers are god awful despite an active effort to under count numbers by the state. You had as many as 400 people dying in a day last year.
Ron DeSantis echoes Trump’s old too-much-covid-testing mantra https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...oes-trumps-old-too-much-covid-testing-mantra/ Many aspects of Donald Trump’s coronavirus response were rather inexplicable — but at the same time rather explicable if you viewed them in light of his political goals. Perhaps the chief example was his repeated suggestions that we were testing too much. Trump wanted to reopen society and have a booming economy ahead of his 2020 reelection bid; proof of lots of people getting sick didn’t help — even as the alternative meant people who could spread the virus (and make the whole situation worse) might not know it. His own coronavirus adviser, Deborah Birx, has since testified that this had a deleterious impact on the administration’s response. Health officials in August 2020 suddenly downgraded their guidance on when to get tested — in line with Trump’s suggestions — and Birx said this wound up coming at a particularly inopportune time, with real-world consequences. Through it all, even Trump’s allies weren’t really on the less-testing train. But now, perhaps his likeliest successor as a GOP presidential nominee — the man who has long been a leading indicator of the GOP’s coronavirus posture — is going down a similar road. He’s also doing so at a rather curious time. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has signaled twice in the past two days that Florida will adjust its testing guidelines to discourage too much testing. During an appearance with controversial state Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo on Monday, Ladapo stated that, “We need to unwind this sort of planning and living one’s life around testing.” DeSantis suggested that he was on the same page, saying people buying up rapid tests and testing without symptoms has created “some of the crunch that you are seeing.” In further comments Tuesday, DeSantis again signaled a move away from mass testing, suggesting it was a symptom of covid “hysteria.” “As Joe said, you do have people — when kind of the hysteria gets going, you’ll have certain people who will go out and will just get tested all the time at some of these sites,” DeSantis said. “And that’s not a good use of resources. And so he’s going to put out guidance that talks about some the examples where it makes sense, where it doesn’t.” There is no question that some people might be overzealous about using up a finite amount of tests. But it’s also true that this particular moment in time is probably the one in which there’s probably the least evidence that we’re seeing too many tests. Florida is dealing with a record surge in cases, but that’s hardly unique to it right now. Its overall per capita numbers of deaths and cases are also on the high end, though below some redder and less-vaccinated states and states that bore the brunt of the early pandemic. What matters most in terms of the present discussion, though, is another key number: its test-positivity rate. Around 30 percent of people who have been tested over the past week in Florida have tested positive. That’s the highest that number has been at any point in the pandemic and the seventh-highest number in the country. As recently as a month ago, only 3 out of every 100 tests there came back positive; now it’s 3 in 10. DeSantis’s comments come even as some in Florida have cried foul over his administration declining to reopen state testing facilities amid the surge and long testing lines. In an interview with The Washington Post last week, a DeSantis spokeswoman cited data showing infections with the omicron variant are generally more mild and asymptomatic. She also cited data from a health system in Miami showing that a majority of patients who tested positive for the virus were admitted for other reasons but were given tests and tested positive. One way to read that is that lots of people who aren’t really that sick with covid-19 just happen to have contracted a mild/asymptomatic case and will be fine. Another is that lots of people who wouldn’t otherwise know it have contracted the virus and can still spread it … to people who might not be so fortunate. This was the bargain at the heart of Trump’s less-testing gambit back in 2020, when he made clear that he really didn’t like how the statistics made him look. (Birx later testified: “I had seen the dramatic decline in testing at a time when we needed a dramatic increase in testing to prevent us from having the depth and breadth of community spread that I knew was coming with the fall surge.”) It’s probably a better bargain now that cases of the virus appear to be less severe and that the omicron peaks in other countries appear to have come relatively quickly following the variant’s arrival. But it’s still a bargain with real consequences. If the reason for that gamble is that we simply don’t have enough testing and need to focus on people who are sick and want to know why, that makes some sense. And DeSantis has pointed in that direction. But the defenses from his office about the mildness of cases and his surgeon general’s comments, in particular, point to testing more as an impediment to the resumption of our daily lives — even as an unprecedented number of people who do get tested are testing positive and potentially spreading the virus. Which sounds rather familiar.