COVIDoug

Doug Underhill is a jackass. That’s not a news flash, I suspect even a lot of his supporters would acknowledge that much. But he’s been in rare form lately, even by his normal standards. The COVID- 19 pandemic is pretty much the only issue anyone one is talking about, and of course Doug is incapable of not being the center of attentions, so he’s made this his cause célèbre. While other politicians are listening to public health officials and other medical experts, Underhill has decided it’s an opportunity to rial up people’s resentment of the government while putting himself up as the true voice of authority on a virus he has no expertise on.

Now I’m sure some of Underhill’s supporters are going to write me ow as just an angry Democrat who never has anything good to say about a Republican. However, I actually think Governor DeSantis has been quite an improvement over our previous governor and is handling this crisis about right. We can always debate the exact timing of a stay at home order but I agree that we can’t just ignore the hardship that shutting down much of the economy will do, so I think he’s done a competent job of balancing the competing interests during these trying times. Commissioner Underhill on the other hand is attempting to turn this into a political issue and seems to be blinded to the reality of what is going on.

Underhill has been posting daily updates on the COVID-19 epidemic for a while now, which if he was simply forwarding official guidance it would be a public service. But of course, that’s not what he’s doing, rather he’s using this crisis as an opportunity to throw other officials under the bus while spreading his misguided opinions on the matter. This culminated on Monday with a mass email sent out to over 40,000 Escambia county residents and other Florida officials calling for the beaches, dine-in restaurants and hotels to be reopened, as well as easing other restrictions. The email had its desired effect of making Doug Underhill the story and getting him multiple interviews on local media. During this media blitz Doug has said some batshit crazy crap that needs to be discussed because I think most people have only heard bits and pieces of it.

In the mass email Underhill sent out he says he wants to open the beaches for local use and claims the only reason they were closed was one video of a drunk spring breaker. Everything about this is ridiculous. How are we going to limit the beaches to locals, set up check points and require ID with home address to access the beach? He also wants the police to enforce the social distancing at the beach. Do we really expect the Sheriff’s office to station officers on the beach to make sure people are setting up the chairs and blankets the proper distance apart? There were plenty of pictures after the pandemic started of North Florida beaches with large numbers of people grouped near the parking lots, trying to get everyone to maintain the proper distance isn’t realistic. Even if we somehow limited the beach to locals and managed to get everyone properly spaced out, they’d all still be using the same restrooms and shower areas.

He also wants to open hotels and restaurants to 50% occupancy, but I guess the people in the hotels aren’t supposed to go to the beach? Dinning in at restaurants puts the workers in close contact with large numbers of people, touching the same plates and other surfaces as the diners. You also have customers walking to and from their tables and the restrooms coming in close contact with other diners. Allowing restaurants to operate as take out only preserves some of the jobs, allows people opportunities to get food and greatly reduces contact between the public and the restaurant staff. 

Doug also seem confused about what social distancing means. Going to a restaurant or the beach with a group of 10 people is not social distancing. Even within a group of 10 people you are supposed to maintain a distance of 6 feet from anyone you don’t live with, if people are going out socially to restaurants and the beach social distancing is unlikely to be maintained. I understand Underhill’s concern for the economic well-being of restaurant workers but allowing the virus to fester only prolongs the pain and in the long run will increase the economic impact of the virus.

Perhaps the flat-out dumbest thing Underhill wrote in the email was, “there is no evidence that the COVID-19 virus can live outside the body in a warm, humid, sunlit environment.” He also equated the Coronavirus with the flu virus in reasoning that the warm weather would prevent the virus from spreading. Numerous researchers including the National Institutes of Health have found the virus can remain stable on surfaces for at least several hours and under some circumstances even days. There is no evidence to support Doug’s assertion that the beach offers any special protection from transmitting the virus.

If that was all he had to say on the topic it would be bad enough, but that was only the beginning. On Sunrise Santa Rosa, Underhill was especially unhinged when discussing his views on the measures the state is taking to limit the spread of COVID-19. The first complete bullshit comment he made was, “For God sake don’t touch your face. I can’t remember how many push-ups I had to do in boot camp for every time I put my hand near my face. And the reason for that is the Navy is extremely serious about infection control because you have a whole bunch of people living in close quarters out at sea.” I asked around in a Facebook group with many Navy veterans if anyone had ever heard of Navy bootcamp making people do pushups for touching their face as a means of infection control. Everyone agreed it was a BS statement. That’s probably one of his more innocuous lies but shows his utter disregard for the truth.

In that same interview he went on to dismiss the models of the spread of the virus liking it to climate change models from 20 years ago that showed we’d be under water by now. Not only are climate change and virus models completely unrelated but he’s wrong about past climate change models. An evaluation of past climate change models conducted by NASA earlier this year showed they have been quite accurate at predicting real world observations. He also talked about how hurricane models never precisely predict where the hurricane will hit. For someone who claims to be a data guy he seems to have no understanding of what modeling is used for. Models give you a range of likely outcomes based on the information that is put into it. From my experience the cone of uncertainty in hurricane predictions tends to be extremely accurate. The hurricane might not hit exactly in the middle of the cone, but that’s why it’s a cone and not a line. 

The virus predictions models also give a range of outcomes with the highest and lowest likely number of cases and deaths. Because we have less data on this new virus than we do about hurricanes the models likely have a greater margin of error and are more subject to revisions as we learn more. However, so far the models have proven to be pretty accurate at predicting the growing number of deaths caused by the virus. Couple of weeks ago we only had around 20 people nationwide dying each day from the virus, but in-line with the model’s predictions we surpassed 1,000 single day deaths on April 1 and yesterday, April 3 , we had over 1,300 deaths. That’s pretty hard to ignore. Underhill went on to repeat many of the problematic statements from his email, but also concluded that the reason for the new social distancing rules was, “some people see other people having fun and it makes them angry.” What a buffoon.

As dumb and dangerous as these rantings have been, perhaps his most outrageous statement came on Andrew McKay’s morning radio show on April 1 . Somehow it seemed reasonable to Doug to compare politicians trying to mitigate the effects of a pandemic crisis to Nazi Germany saying, “People often say I can’t imagine how the Germans allowed themselves to go the way they did WWII, but you shouldn’t be surprised at all by that. Fear mentality, hive mentality attacking people who have a different opinion than you do, personally or on moral grounds instead of looking at the facts is very dangerous behavior and particularly when it’s done by an elected official.” This is especially interesting coming from someone who is making an emotional appeal based on cherry picked statistics to support his unscientific policy positions, exactly like the goddamned Nazis did in determining the superiority of the Aryan race. To be clear I’m not calling Commissioner Underhill a Nazi, but he is using the same type of emotional quasi-scientific rational as the Nazis in appealing to the public.

Finally, Underhill has compared the Coronavirus stimulus bill to the BP oil settlement even though they’re completely unrelated and are being administered in a completely different method for completely different reasons. He’s suggested that Pensacola is at a low risk for a serious outbreak because of the low population density, despite the fact Idaho, Arkansas, South Carolina and Indiana are all COVID-19 hot spots. In fact, Mississippi now leads the nation in having the highest percentage of people hospitalized for the virus. The idea that population density is going to save us is misguided and dangerous. Underhill even tried to link the COVID-19 crisis to abortion calling it an elective surgery that should not be allowed under the “stay at home” order, seemingly oblivious to the time sensitive nature of an abortion as opposed to a boob job.

The COVID-19 epidemic is the biggest crisis to hit this country since 9-11 and people are looking to their elected officials for leadership. Rather than presenting an united front in the face of this emergency, like so many other challenges we face as a county, the Board of County Commissioners have 4 members who are adults that are doing their best to provide sound leadership and one spoiled child who is jumping up and down crying “look at me.” When we see people continuing to defy the social distancing guidance packing into bingo parlors, attending church services and throwing parties it’s because of the clear sense that this is all a media hoax that people like Doug Underhill are promoting. 

During the 1918 influenza pandemic it was the cities that took the most decisive action early on that recovered the quickest afterward. This is a historical lesson that Doug Underhill seems to have missed. Hopefully for the people of Escambia County, the rest of the BOCC will listen to the recommendations of doctors and infectious disease experts and implement sound science based policies to reduce the spread of the COVID-19 virus and position us for a stronger recovery after treatments and a vaccine are developed.