BREAKING NEWS: Coronavirus: Florida is so welcoming
Bullshit oozes but facts are hard things. Here are the facts about Covid-19 in Florida. On May 4, the day when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis decreed the state would start to reopen, there were 819 cases of the new coronavirus reported in the state.
Yesterday, June 24, there were 5,508 new cases reported, 6.7 times the cases recorded the day of reopening. Governor DeSantis says the state is better-off today in relation to Covid-19 than in April. The governor, following in the footsteps of his mentor Donald Trump, is almost as great a bull artist as the guy in the White House. In what universe does a 670 percent increase in a deadly virus count as progress?
DeSantis argues that it is worse than it looks because most of the new infections are coming among younger people. Tell that bit of BS to the parents of two children under eighteen that died of Covid-19 this week in Florida.
It’s true that young people, although they can die of the coronavirus too, have a better chance of surviving than their elders. But they can carry the virus without showing symptoms, and they can thus unknowingly pass the disease to the older people they come in contact with routinely, like parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts, and servers in bars and restaurants.
Even in South Florida, where public officials took a more cautious approach than the governor, cases are spiking, and evidence shows people are not taking minimal precautions like wearing a mask. Yesterday, I took a bike ride in my Southwest Miami neighborhood of Shenandoah, from 16th Street and 17th Avenue to the long, narrow park on 13th Avenue. I sat there for thirty minutes and counted how many people walking three or four feet in front of me were wearing a mask. I did not count the few that had a mask off but put it on when they approached me sitting on a bench wearing one.
Then I rode three or four minutes back to my house and counted the masked versus the mask-less. The final tally? Less than two out of ten wore the mask, exactly 18 percent. That’s what you get when you use toothless guidance rather than mandatory rules with real consequences. That’s why Florida, Texas, and a bunch of other states are in deep shit now.
You can blame individual lack of responsibility among far too many in this city, but the bigger problem by far is leadership, not the absence of leadership although there is plenty of that, but leaders who point the people toward the abyss, comforting them all the way that everything is good, and giving the opposite of a good example by not wearing a mask and not practicing social distancing.
Bullshit and bluster are the stock-in-trade of Ron DeSantis and his mentor Donald Trump. But you can’t bullshit a deadly virus and get away with it. Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, you made your beds. Now lie in it.
