Apology Not Offered
By 
I have a piece up on the homepage today about Florida’s approach to the COVID-19 crisis. If you talk to Governor DeSantis and his team, it’s impossible to conclude anything other than that they have taken this seriously from the beginning, been immersed in the data and research, and crafted a well-considered response. Which makes it all the more astonishing and unfair that the media has been portraying DeSantis as a yokel who was going to get Floridians killed with his lax approach. In fact, on an absolutely central policy question — how to deal with the nursing homes — DeSantis and his team were much more stringent than other states.–Rich “Starbursts” Lowry, May 20, 2020
As bars, gyms, vacation rentals and movie theaters reopened at partial capacity last week in all but three South Florida counties, the number and rate of new COVID-19 cases were rising statewide — a troubling indicator that the disease could be spreading more quickly.
The 64 counties that moved into the second phase of reopening on June 5 saw a near 42 percent increase in new cases the week before that could not be explained by increased testing alone, according to a Miami Herald analysis of the Florida health department’s case data. Testing had increased by only 8 percent over the same period.
Florida’s coronavirus numbers have continued their surge, including Thursday’s statewide tally of new positives — 1,698, which was the highest single-day total of confirmed cases yet. That number, in turn, was exceeded on Friday, when the state announced another 1,902 confirmed cases.
“We are seeing the very leading indicators of a resurgence in the number of cases, and now is the time to take action,” said Eric Toner, a pandemic preparedness expert with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, who reviewed the Herald analysis.
The Herald used three-day rolling averages of new cases and the percentage of positive tests out of total tests to calculate trends over seven- and 14-day periods. Guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest that communities should not move into phase two without seeing a “downward trajectory” in either new cases or rate of positive tests for at least two weeks after entering phase one.
Wow, who could possibly have anticipated that re-opening the state to obviously unsafe practices absent any vaccine or treatment would cause the pandemic to resurge?
The country’s second-most populous state is in a similar boat. This is happening not because it’s impossible to crush the virus — it’s possible — but because many of our leaders have simply given up and the results are going to be disastrous.