FAILURE BY THE NUMBERS, Ron DeSantis is doing the Florida what Trump did to America

 

 

 

When Ron DeSantis was first elected he seemed surprisingly decent by Republican standards. Granted, that’s a low bar to hurdle. However, at some point in his first year he seemed to pivot from trying to govern to positioning himself as the next Donald Trump for a future run at the White House. It’s been all downhill since then. He’s worked his way through all the right-wing touchstone issues to build his MAGA credentials. He cracked down on civil right protesters even though there were no violent protests in Florida in 2020. Black Lives Matter has become one of his favorite targets of ridicule. DeSantis sent 50 Florida law enforcement officers to the Texas border for an unspecified mission at taxpayer expense. At least he was able to go to Texas and get a good photo-op. He led the effort to keep felons, who have finished their sentences, from voting and signed a law forbidding teaching Critical Race Theory, despite the fact it’s never been taught in Florida. In short, he’s turned into a pathetic wannabe Trump.

He’s also mirroring Trump in his response to COVID. For someone with presidential aspirations this is odd considering Trump’s failed COVID policies were the driving force in his loss. He was one of the first governors to ease restrictions following the first wave in the spring of 2020. This led to a massive second wave in July and August. As soon as that wave passed, he dropped all restrictions and signed an executive order banning local communities from instituting their own restrictions. This of course led to the third and most deadly wave in November through February. Along the way he forced schools to open to all students five days a week in 2020, banned vaccine passports and has been battling with cruise lines to try and force them to drop vaccine requirements.

Now in August of 2021 Florida has become ground zero in the fourth wave of COVID. Florida now accounts for 22% of America’s COVID deaths even though it only represents 6% of the population. In the middle of this storm Ron DeSantis has signed an executive order preventing local school districts from implementing mandatory masks. The only problem is he doesn’t actually have the authority to do that. So he’s now threatening to withhold the pay of any local official who implements a school mask mandate. He’s also eliminated the distance learning option that was in place last year.

He’s trying to sell this as protecting parents' rights to choose if their children wear masks. Yet, school districts across the state have school uniform requirements which parents can’t opt out of. He’s also ignoring some basic facts in issuing these executive orders. Parents who want their children to wear masks simply aren’t going to have that option. Sure, they can send their children to school with a mask, but we all know that once they get there and most of the kids aren’t wearing them, few if any students will continue to wear the masks. Also, over the last year we’ve all learned more about the role of masks in preventing viral infections than we ever wanted to know. Masks can lower the odds of a wearer becoming infected, but viruses can find ways around or through the masks. The real benefit of masks is it lowers the chances of an infected person from transmitting the virus. Making masks optional removes most of the benefit of wearing a mask to begin with.

I recently pored through the latest data for Florida on the healthdata.gov website and put together these charts. Here’s the takeaway. The first chart shows COVID hospitalizations for people under 18 going back to the start of the year. About 100,000 Americans died of COVID in January, but the pediatric hospitalizations were fairly low in Florida. We learned over the course of the last school year that this coronavirus tended to not have much impact on young children. Schools were not the super spreader events that many feared.

Now with the delta variant the rate of children being hospitalized is hitting all-time highs in Florida. At the height of the last wave Florida had 68 children hospitalized with COVID which dropped to 20 earlier this summer. The number of hospitalized children has now skyrocketed to 187. We know from anecdotal accounts that some of these children have died, however the data for pediatric deaths isn’t readily available. Keep in mind this is happening in the summer when children are out of school. Now Ron DeSantis is going to conduct a massive experiment on Florida’s school children to see how lethal the delta variant is. This is unconscionable.

Image by Author, data from healthdata.gov

The next two charts compare the data in Florida and New York since the beginning of the year. I picked New York as a comparison because it has a similar population to Florida, but has taken a very different approach to COVID. New York has continued with COVID restrictions and been more aggressive in promoting vaccination. The first chart shows the daily hospital admissions for people under 60 were roughly equal for the two states until mid-April. At that time New York’s hospitalizations drastically fell in comparison to Florida. That’s a couple weeks after they opened vaccines to younger people. Florida likewise opened vaccine eligibility at about the same time, but fewer young people took advantage of it. Once the delta variant hit it had little effect in New York while Florida was caught with its pants down due to a lackadaisical vaccine campaign and persistent opposition to wearing masks. The next chart shows the number of COVID deaths in the two states. It nearly mirrors the previous chart. This shows the current spike in cases and deaths wasn’t inevitable, it’s the result of a failure of leadership.

Image by Author, data from healthdata.gov

The next set of charts shows the impact of vaccinations by age. The first chart shows the vaccination rates in the U.S., Florida and New York. In people under 65, Florida trails New York by about 10%. Interestingly, among senior citizens Florida is doing pretty good. To Ron DeSantis’ credit, when the vaccine first became available he actively promoted it to the elderly. However, it seems he feared angering the MAGA crowd by pushing younger people to get the vaccine. The next chart shows that initially when the vaccine was being primarily offered to older people, hospitalizations fell at about the same rate in both states. Yet, once the states opened the vaccine to everyone one in late March, New York’s rate continued to fall at about the same rate while Florida’s began to level off. This is also reflected in the next chart that shows in January only about 30% of COVID hospitalizations were under 60. As the elderly became vaccinated in large numbers, the percentage of younger patients increased to around 55% in mid-April and has stayed there ever since.

Image by Author, data from healthdata.gov and the New York Times

My final chart shows the percentage of COVID patients in Florida’s Intensive Care Units (ICU). In just over a month COVID patients have increased 6x in the state’s ICUs. As the delta variant has taken hold in Florida, ICU’s have gone from 75% of capacity to 90% over the last 6 weeks. Another couple of weeks of increases on this scale and we’ll be at full capacity. America is in the midst of a fourth wave of COVID, but it’s concentrated in certain parts of the country, including Florida. It’s clear that states with the highest vaccination rates have lower community transmission than the states with the lowest vaccination rates. However, that doesn’t fully explain the disparity in cases from state to state. Keeping a pandemic under control takes a coordinated effort that follows the best available science. In Florida, DeSantis has followed Trump’s lead in making the virus a political issue rather than a public health crisis. He’s up for re-election in 2022, if there’s any cosmic justice he’ll suffer Trump’s fate at the polls.

Image by Author, data from healthdata.gov