Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump, not social distancing on April 28, 2020
The news about COVID (a/k/a Coronavirus or COVID-19) cases in Florida is coming fast and furious, and it’s not good. Cases are skyrocketing. Additionally, Apple announced Friday morning that it was temporarily re-closing all 14 of its South Florida stores (located in Miami-Dade County, Broward County and Palm Beach County, where the most COVID cases have occurred in the state). And also on Friday, the state of Florida banned alcohol sales at all bars statewide. It feels like a more extensive lockdown is inevitable. And it’s happening three days after the Director of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said that the Coronavirus has “brought this nation to its knees,” but that, at the same time, our efforts to fight the virus are still underfunded. Let’s take a look at this Republican failure of government:
Obviously, the failure begins and ends with Donald Trump. His administration knew about the COVID emergency at the beginning of January. Since then, as has been well documented, Trump downplayed the pandemic, saying that:
–COVID is a “hoax”
–“We have it totally under control”
–“You have 15 people [with COVID], and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.”
–Americans can “inject” disinfectant into their bodies to prevent COVID.
All the while, Trump kept playing golf and holding political rallies. And now we have over 2.5 million Coronavirus cases and over 127,000 deaths.
Unfortunately, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has done no better. He prematurely “reopened” Florida, as did other Republican governors in their states, to please Trump for political reasons, because Trump was terrified that a nationwide lockdown or continuing state lockdowns would result in bad economic numbers and hurt his reelection chances. Now, however, we are suffering the very foreseeable results. DeSantis had the nerve to say that he is not surprised by the sharp increase in Florida’s COVID cases, because testing has increased. This is a dangerous logical fallacy no matter how you look at it. First, it means that we did not do enough testing to begin with, which would have identified more people with Coronavirus. Thus, some people who had the virus and did not know it (for example, because they felt no symptoms) or weren’t ordered to take precautions, unnecessarily spread it to others. Second, deliberately or negligently suppressing the number of reported cases by taking fewer tests or otherwise understating the numbers gave us dangerous false information on which the political decision to reopen prematurely (and close too late in the first place) was based. In short, COVID doesn’t care whether you ignore it or not, and the Republican strategy of “cut and run” from the Coronavirus is the very opposite of leadership.
In case someone argues that all of these results were inevitable, we need only look at what has happened in other countries, such as the European Union nations, for comparison. Many of these countries have bent their COVID curve sharply downward, as America’s cases are continuing and even increasing. The sad fact is that our country’s current tragedy is far greater in scope than had to be the case, and the blame lies primarily with Republicans such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis who downplayed the crisis for political reasons. Moreover, this Republican failure of government was based on a false choice from the get-go: the idea that we had to choose between public health and the economy. The evidence shows that we can’t have one without the other.
Photo by The White House, used under Creative Commons license. https://is.gd/B4YfEw
