
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis during a press conference at Tampa General Hospital on Monday, April 27, 2020 in Tampa.
Ron DeSantis, Florida’s mini-trump governor, didn’t close down the state until spring breakers had the chance to come down and revel on the beaches. Many of them got infected and went home and passed the virus on to family and friends in other states. COVID loved it. The lockdown was in early April.
But it was never a full lockdown. Groceries stores and other “essential” businesses were still open. And this was before masks became a part of daily life. Testing was a complete disaster – not just in Palm Beach County, but in Broward and Miami-Dade counties to the south of us as well. Monroe County – the Florida Keys – sealed themselves off from the mainland and today, July 18, have only 768 cases and six deaths. Dog parks and other public parks were closed, bars, gyms, restaurants except for takeout orders, schools, hair and nail salons etc.
In March and April, when the epicenter was in New York state, DeSantis crowed about what a great job Florida was doing, with testing sites set up and running, hospitals humming along without any problems, case numbers low (compared to now). DeSantis felt so good about things in Florida that when trump made rally calls about opening the country, DeSantis was one of the first to answer that call – along with his fellow republican governors in Georgia, Arizona, Texas.
On Memorial Day weekend, then the July 4th weekend, beaches were jammed. Restaurants were up and running with alleged distancing, mask rules etc. Protests consumed the news. People stopped paying attention to COVID. But the funny thing about a virus is that it doesn’t give a shit what you want or think or desire. It doesn’t care what color you are, what political party you belong to, whether you’re straight, gay, transgender, a CEO or homeless. Its focus is to find a new host and dig in.
So now on July 17, about six months into all this, here’s where we are in terms of countries- the top 18.

States:

See Florida there, 3rd on the list? 327,241. That’s total cases. And for the last several weeks our new cases have broken records set in New York – more than 15 ,000 on July 12. Notice that we, a state, fall between Mexico and Chile – 7 and 8 on the country graph. Keep in mind some other facts. As of 2019, Florida had 21.48 million people. Chile, as of 2018, had 18.7 million. Mexico in 2018 had 126.2 million.
DeSantis still hasn’t issued a mandatory mask order. The Republicans are still planning their convention in an outside venue in Jacksonville in late August. Right now, Florida temperatures are usually in the 90s, with the heat index somewhere around 105 to 110.
This is the kind of heat that turns your hair sopping wet, that drenches your clothes, that makes you thirst for water and air conditioning and ice, and not necessarily in that order. It’s the kind of heat that would make trump’s mop of orange or white hair melt, that would bring Mitch McConnell to his knees, that would send Pence into an air conditioned church to pray for climate change. Uh-huh, repugs. Think again.
As you try to alter reality with your lying narratives, to bend and falsify statistics and facts that fit your bogus versions of reality, people are dying, hospital are becoming overwhelmed, 2020 has become a shit show that illustrates just how incompetent repug governors are.
The bottom line is ugly: trump and his admin don’t care if you get sick and die. They don’t care if your kids and their teachers are incurring an unnecessary risk by returning to school. Or if you’re exposing yourself to greater risk if you return to work. If you fly. And if you’re American, you can’t enter Europe, Mexico or Canada. Our welcome mat has been pulled.
They. Do. Not. Care.
So it’s up to us – you and you and you. What choices do we make?
POSTSCRIPT
Today, there were more than 71,000 new cases in the U.S.
Today, Florida had another 10,328 new cases.
Today, DeSantis gave another say nothing meaningful press conference.
