Florida Man Leads His State To The Morgue - New Republic
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On Monday, as Patronis’s office was mailing state corporations to try and ferret out Commies in their midst, Florida identified 2,783 new cases of coronavirus among its residents, the state’s highest single-day total since the global pandemic broke out. It was the third record-high daily case total Florida reported in the past week. Those numbers have risen steadily since June began, a direct and predictable consequence of decisions made by a state government in which Republicans have dominated the Cabinet, House, and Senate for 20 of the past 21 years. The state now says it has recorded 83,000 cases of Covid-19 and 3,000 deaths. For a month, Governor Ron DeSantis, Patronis’s ostensible boss and a partner in the decades-long conservative project to turn Florida into a no-services fiefdom for frictionless profiteering, has pushed to reopen bars, restaurants, and beaches—science and statistics be damned.
Now, nonwealthy Floridians are getting sick and dying in record numbers. Sixteen women attended a recent birthday party at a prematurely opened, packed, mostly maskless bar in Jacksonville, and all contracted the virus. Five workers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s “Hurricane Hunter” airbase in Lakeland have come down with the virus, just as an especially active storm season is kicking off in Florida. Multiple bars in St. Petersburg have voluntarily shut down after the coronavirus roared back among their service staff.
Back in April, the Trump administration used a controversially sunny projection model to predict that, at worst, 100,000 Americans would die of coronavirus-related illness. That model now puts Florida at a literal inflection point: From here until October 1, it predicts, Florida’s Covid-19 deaths will likely sextuple, from 3,000 to more than 18,000. That’s the likeliest course; there’s a possibility up to 55,000 Floridians may be dead by then. If so, the dead would number roughly twice DeSantis’s margin of victory in his 2018 gubernatorial election.
On Tuesday, DeSantis took a break from welcoming the Republican National Convention to Jacksonville, waving the starting flag at a Nascar race south of Miami, and pushing for schools to open this fall, to announce that “No, we’re not shutting down, you know, we’re going to go forward.” He also echoed President Trump and Vice President Pence in writing off the troubling rise in Covid cases as attributable to higher rates of testing. But all the available data show that Florida has a dangerously high, rising number of positive tests per capita; positive tests now make up as many as 7 percent of all tests in Florida. Testing is finding more afflicted Floridians because there are more afflicted Floridians. “The fact that these are going up means there’s more community spread,” said Palm Beach County health director Alina Alonso. “The virus now has food out there. It has people that are out there without masks, without maintaining distancing. So it’s infecting more people.”
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https://newrepublic.com/article/158215/florida-coronavirus-cases-ron-desantis-leads-state-morgue
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