Coronavirus Florida: Editorial: In the worst public health crisis in generations, DeSantis is a massive fail
Once again, Florida is a national laughingstock. But this time, the joke is literally a sick one. And our governor is a special recipient of scorn and ridicule.
We want him to do better, for all our sake.
But embarrassing to say, all the swipes — from late-night host Stephen Colbert to headline writers everywhere — are completely deserved.
Last Sunday, July 12, Florida recorded a chilling national record: more than 15,300 new COVID-19 cases in a single day. If Florida were a country, it would rank fourth in the world in this appalling category. Our new peers: the United States, Brazil and India.
On Thursday, Florida chalked up its highest-ever daily death total: 156 COVID-19 fatalities. Which followed the previous high, set just two days before, of 132.
On Wednesday, the state’s total of cases since the start of the pandemic crashed past 300,000.
And Gov. Ron DeSantis arrogantly called the frightening surge “a blip.”
This denotes incompetence. And the whole country sees it.
CNN political analyst Chris Cillizza’s take was typical of the daily national commentary. “The situation in Florida appears to be on the verge of becoming totally out of control — if it's not there already,” he wrote Tuesday. “DeSantis seems unwilling to acknowledge that reality — and how wrong he was about his state's battle against the virus.”
All through this worsening crisis, DeSantis has tried to prematurely hang up a “Mission Accomplished” banner. As we’ve said before, he has taken some good steps — notably, severely cutting off access to nursing homes, early on, to protect the most vulnerable of Florida’s many elderly residents.
But the official who is supposed to be leading the charge against Florida’s greatest health emergency in generations has mainly told us that things aren’t as serious as they appear and that the most important thing is to hurry back to “normal” as soon as possible.
As recently as Monday, DeSantis was repeating his tired mantra — borrowed from his political mentor President Donald Trump — that a major reason for the soaring rise in cases was an increase in testing. Tell that to the staff in South Florida’s rapidly filling hospitals, which are starting to resemble New York City’s overwhelmed wards of April. Those are real people getting sick and dying in greater numbers, not some trick of statistics.
DeSantis utterly failed to foresee the current tidal wave of cases, which began as a modest rise soon after the state reopened from stay-at-home orders in May. Why? Because he was so busy claiming that those testing positive were mainly younger people who experienced only mild symptoms or none at all. He was blind to the altogether predictable result that they would spread the virus to many more people than before and inevitably hit the more susceptible — young as well as old.
While the state’s COVID-19 curve kept rising higher and higher, DeSantis stubbornly continued to resist issuing a statewide mask order. Worse, he appeared but rarely in a mask himself. His messaging, like Trump’s: I don’t care what every public health official says to do, I’m too cool to wear a mask.
DeSantis has taken such a cramped approach to this crisis that he publicly refused help from Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York, where positive COVID tests are down to 1%. (Florida: 19%) even while a senior staffer at the Florida Department of Health was thanking Cuomo’s office for offering a shipment of the antiviral drug remdesivir. How does that kind of tough-guy posturing help the people of Florida?
DeSantis’ administration has allegedly manipulated or masked statistics to make the pandemic seem more benign. We learned on Wednesday that his surgeon general ordered Palm Beach County’s health director not to write a letter giving her view that schools not reopen until the contagion rate subsides.
School Board Chairman Frank Barbieri got it right in saying that Dr. Alina Alonso had been “politically silenced by Tallahassee.” It is outrageous to silence public health officials in a public health emergency.
This is a leadership failure of mammoth proportions, a failure that will contribute to long-term illness and death for many of the citizens that a governor is supposed to protect. No wonder that a hashtag is trending: #DeSantisResign. We’d prefer “DeSantisStepUp.
In some other states where the virus is raging at unprecedented rates — California, Arizona, even the GOP stronghold of Texas — governors are starting to roll back the reopenings that, it is clear now, placed too much faith in people’s common sense to wear the masks and keep the six-foot distances needed to contain the virus’ spread.
But DeSantis? As of this writing, on Thursday, not a hint of how he intends to curb the contagion.
On Wednesday, asked by the AP whether he felt he has handled everything right, DeSantis replied that he and others are “working every day” battling the pandemic. “Obviously, we wish this could just go away, that’s not just how these things work.”
No, the coronavirus cannot just be wished away, and it is frightening that the governor of Florida is still talking as though that were ever an option.
It is past time for DeSantis to ground himself in some hard realities and admit that the economy will not revive until we greatly slow the zooming spread of this too-often-deadly disease.
Does he even have a plan on how to do that?