He also sent me a social distancing scoreboard compiled by a mobility data firm called Unacast. In April, the firm gave Florida a grade of B, meaning that people in the state had reduced their mobility by 55% to 70%. For most of June, Florida’s grade has been F.
DeSantis is said to be furious at the bars that are violating the rules. He has sent inspectors across the state with instructions to pull the licenses of offenders. But during a news conference the other day in Orlando, while noting that younger people are far less likely to suffer severe consequences from Covid-19, he also seemed to suggest that there wasn’t much he could do to keep them from activities that could spread the virus.
And you know something? Maybe there isn’t. Cities across Florida are reimposing mask requirements—sometimes setting steep fines for offenders. And the state government is also stressing the importance of wearing masks and maintaining social distancing.
Should Florida go back into lockdown because people in their 20s and 30s are engaging in risky behavior? That’s what DeSantis’s critics seem to want, but that would impose another kind of hardship—more people would lose their jobs, schools wouldn’t be able to reopen, and the economy would go into a tailspin.
Given the federal government’s utter mismanagement of the pandemic, it has fallen to governors to make decisions about balancing the risk of the virus spreading against the risk of economic calamity. DeSantis, it seems to me, is doing a pretty good job of it: Florida is protecting its elderly, cautioning the population to take appropriate protective measures but also allowing life to go on, knowing that the younger and less vulnerable are likely to do dumb things. The situation may change—the hospital system could become overwhelmed if positive cases climb relentlessly, for example—but for now, the approach makes sense.
DeSantis’s true problem is that he too often says and does things that inflame the situation. Last week, he blamed the sudden rise in positive cases on the influx of Hispanic farmworkers, which infuriated his critics. Earlier, his administration told medical examiners across the state they could no longer release information about coronavirus cases. That caused several newspapers to accuse him of hiding information.
But if you can ignore what DeSantis says, and focus instead on what Florida has done, it’s hard not to be impressed. Florida’s population is the third largest in the U.S. One out of every five residents is elderly. Yet it ranks in the bottom half of the U.S. in terms of deaths per 100,000 citizens. That may not be what DeSantis’s critics want to hear, but it’s true.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.