See
Let the Sun Shine In by Michael Hendrix the Manhattan Institute.
"For a moment in April, the Internet tried to cancel Florida. Photos showing crowds flocking to Jacksonville Beach amid the Covid-19 pandemic brought the hashtag #FloridaMorons to the top of Twitter. The media eagerly spun scenes
of ignorant spring breakers endangering themselves and others. Nearly
two months after America’s first case of coronavirus, here was Florida’s
Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, joining neighboring state Georgia’s “experiment in human sacrifice” by letting locals lift restrictions on their own.
Nearly a month later, Jacksonville’s Duval County reports new Covid-19 hospitalizations in the single digits. Rates of hospitalizations, cases, and deaths remain steady across Florida. So far, fewer Floridians have died of the novel coronavirus than in New York’s nursing homes alone (2,259 compared with 5,800, at least). More than half of the state’s known cases of Covid-19 are found in just four South Florida counties—the top out-of-state destinations for fleeing New Yorkers. As Politico recently concluded,
“Florida just doesn’t look nearly as bad as the national news media and
sky-is-falling critics have been predicting for about two months now.”
There’s still a lot that we don’t know about mitigating Covid-19, but
Florida’s approach—a decentralized health response with targeted
lockdowns and quarantines reinforced by voluntary social
distancing—appears to have worked. Other populous states adopting this
approach, such as Tennessee, have seen similar success. Governor
DeSantis’s experience suggests that it is possible to keep a lid on the
coronavirus even while gradually reopening.
Florida is large and diverse. North Florida and the Panhandle are the
reason for the saying that the farther north you go in Florida, the
further south you get; the I-4 corridor, running from Tampa through
Orlando to Daytona Beach, is pure Middle America. South Florida is the
polyglot “New Havana,” a bubbling melting pot between the Gulf and Gold
Coasts. Unsurprisingly, then, DeSantis gave counties leeway in
responding to Covid-19. “The epidemic is not going to affect this state
uniformly,” he told National Review.
Miami-Dade County, for instance, shuttered all its nonessential businesses before
New York City, and it was local leaders who first closed many of
Florida’s beaches and cracked down on large gatherings. When Florida did
issue
a stay-at-home order (two days after New York), it targeted the state’s
4 million seniors and residents with underlying medical conditions.
Statewide rules issued on April 1 broadly limited “nonessential”
activities and business, but by this point Floridians had already imposed their own restrictions on themselves.
Meantime, the state government in Tallahassee was ramping up testing
and issuing personal protective equipment (PPE), ultimately totaling
more than 7 million masks and a million gloves. By late April, the state was conducting some 12,000 daily Covid-19 tests,
with capacity for more, and drive-through facilities alone had
conducted more than 100,000 tests by early May. (New York, by contrast,
was doing 20,000 tests daily in mid-April, at least 100,000 below
what it needed, considering the size of its outbreak.) State-based labs
were soon running 30,000 samples daily. Decentralizing testing has
meant that Jacksonville’s testing volume, for instance, now runs far above federal guidelines. And the state’s rate of positive samples—a
sign of testing capacity relative to size of outbreak—stands at 2.41
percent as of May 24, well below the World Health Organization’s
threshold of 5 percent for safely reopening.
Florida’s response to Covid-19 focused on nursing homes. More than a third of the nation’s Covid deaths have occurred among the residents and staff of long-term-care facilities—a share that jumps as high as 80 percent in Minnesota and West Virginia. Florida counts
more than 350,000 people living or working in such facilities, and the
state has one of the highest shares of residents over the age of 65. At
the start of the outbreak, Florida deployed rapid-response teams to
these facilities to test, treat, and, if necessary, isolate or
quarantine residents testing positive for the virus. The state issued
PPE to these facilities and mandated its use. While New York was moving
sick patients into nursing homes, Florida was moving them out.
On March 15, DeSantis prohibited the transfer of Covid-19-positive
patients into long-term-care facilities and established Covid-only homes
for getting residents out who could not be properly isolated or
treated. By contrast, New York governor Andrew Cuomo—celebrated in the
media, while DeSantis was condemned—required that infected patients be
admitted into nursing homes, where Cuomo himself had said the virus
could spread “like fire through grass.”
As DeSantis saw growing numbers of cases from out-of-state visitors,
he promptly ordered travelers to self-quarantine for 14 days, a measure
that the governor believes
“no doubt” saved lives. Florida’s targeted, data-driven approach to
tackling the coronavirus may be the most realistic strategy when many
are still trying to understand how Covid-19 spreads—and how to stop it.
The Department of Health produces a daily report
for the governor tracking the outbreak and new hotspots, such as state
prisons, or The Villages, a sprawling retirement community with more
than 125,000 people, which hasn’t had a single resident hospitalized for more than a week. Contrary to what recent media coverage would suggest, Florida’s Covid-19 open-data dashboard has earned praise from officials like Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House Coronavirus Task Force coordinator.
DeSantis is not the only governor whose performance is going largely
uncredited. Tennessee’s governor Bill Lee is an unsung hero of the
pandemic. Lee declared a state of emergency in March and told residents
to “do your part, stay apart.” The state’s largest cities—Nashville,
Memphis, and Knoxville—issued stay-at-home orders as cases appeared, but
Lee held off on statewide mandates. Studies have since shown
that such early, targeted lockdowns, combined with state guidance,
appear to be more effective at mitigating the spread of the virus than
late-stage total lockdowns. Lee focused on ramping up Tennessee’s
testing capacity, ultimately hitting more testing benchmarks
than any other state. During the height of the pandemic, Tennessee’s
testing rate was three times that of neighboring Kentucky—and all tests
were provided free of charge, regardless of symptoms.
Lee’s performance—and its media treatment—contrast sharply with that
of neighboring governor Andy Beshear of Kentucky. Louisville’s Courier-Journal has praised Beshear’s response while declaring
that Lee has “taken more heat than Prince’s Hot Chicken for his slow
response to the coronavirus outbreak.” Even an ocean away, Beshear won
praise: the U.K.’s Guardian celebrated his
“quick pandemic response, his calm, empathetic briefings” and likened
him to “Mr. Rogers.” Yet Kentucky has now suffered more deaths than
Tennessee from the virus, though the latter state’s population is half
again larger.
In states such as Tennessee and Florida, where lockdowns are ending,
infection rates are declining, not increasing, as JPMorgan Chase found, “even after allowing for an appropriate measurement lag.” Rising case counts, where they occur, have more to do with increases
in testing capacity than renewed outbreaks. This should encourage some
humility from observers who feared the worst with reopening, especially
in a media environment overwhelmingly concentrated in the blue, urban hubs that have suffered so much more
from this viral outbreak than the redder states now likelier to reopen.
Even today, after the virus has spread to all corners of the country,
the Tri-State area alone accounts for 43 percent of the nation’s deaths.
Indeed, the closer
one gets to New York City, the higher the death toll from Covid-19. No
wonder that, at the height of the pandemic, some 420,000 people fled the Big Apple to its suburbs and to South Florida.
Florida’s beaches and businesses are slowly opening, county by county, and life is returning to a semblance of normalcy. Retailers and restaurants, hair and nail salons, gyms and hotels are opening with reduced occupancy; soon, “phase two” will allow gatherings of up to 50 people and further loosen occupancy limits. Partially opened Tampa was among the first U.S. cities
to let restaurants extend dining space onto closed streets and open
sidewalks, helping them stay in business while preserving social
distancing.
Florida considers numerous factors
in deciding when and how to reopen, such as whether the state is
controlling the virus’s spread, containing new cases, ensuring hospital
capacity, and monitoring vulnerable populations. It turns out that most
Americans are not heedlessly returning to “normal” as viral videos suggest, but are wearing masks and social distancing on their own, including in Florida.
The United States has reached a grim milestone: 100,000 deaths from
Covid-19. In addition to its toll in lives, the virus has also ushered
in an economic downturn as deep as the Great Depression nearly a century
ago, with more than 38 million Americans having filed for unemployment. Each state’s experience differs,
with each paying its own price in lives or livelihoods. Governors
should be judged by their own state’s record going into and coming out
of this crisis. It’s a standard that surely elevates governors like Ron
DeSantis and Bill Lee—and likely condemns Andrew Cuomo."
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