You'd think - for instance in today's Sunday Times "exposé", 22 days of dither and delay on coronavirus that cost thousands of British lives - that our government's response has been uniquely appalling. But compared to Florida under Republican governor Ron DeSantis, Boris and co. have been models of efficiency. And yet the predicted catastrophe never quite happened there:
Florida seemed headed for disaster: In the earliest days of the coronavirus epidemic in the U.S., throngs of rowdy spring breakers flocked to the state’s beaches and bars. Disney World, which draws visitors from around the globe, seemed a uniquely dangerous breeding ground. And the state’s demographics were worrying, given that Florida is chock-full of retirees in populous senior communities (Gov. Ron DeSantis has recently joked that Florida is “God’s waiting room”).
DeSantis, for his part, spouted off false information about the virus as he resisted increasingly urgent calls from experts and local leaders to take action. He refused to close the spring break gathering spots, allowing officials in South Florida to make their own decisions about restaurant and beach closures. He waited until April 1—two weeks after other states began closing their businesses—to issue a “safer-at-home” order. As Florida reported the first deaths on the East Coast, it seemed inevitable that the country’s third-largest state would join New York, Washington, and California as one of the pandemic’s regional hubs.
The disaster didn’t arrive, though. Florida hasn’t exactly been spared, and as of Tuesday, it has had more than 47,000 cases and more than 2,000 deaths. But the predictions had been dire: 465,000 Floridians hospitalized under the worst-case scenario, if social distancing measures were not enacted. If you rank states by the number of cases per capita, Florida is 32nd—just worse than California. (It’s 27th on the list of deaths per capita.) Despite many ominous signs about Florida’s handling of the coronavirus, the state appears to be doing, surprisingly, OK.
This has led people to speculate. Were fears overblown and DeSantis’ critics wrong? Could it be that Florida never needed to take the kinds of measures New York took? Is it just the weather?
One key element, it turns out, was that care homes were not used as dumping grounds for the elderly, cleared from hospitals to make room for the expected coronavirus wave without testing - as happened in New York and also here in the UK. Apart from that, yes, the sunny weather may have been a factor. But it does seem to show that, strive as we might to blame everything on political decisions, there's more going on with Covid-19 statistics than just greater and lesser degrees of political incompetence.
On the question of those "thousands of lives" that an earlier UK lockdown would have saved had Boris been less dithering, it's never made quite clear what would have happened to those people in the case of that early lockdown. Would they have lived happily ever after? Since we're told that the virus isn't going anywhere, wouldn't they have to self-isolate until a vaccine might, or might not, be developed? Good luck with that. Plus the overwhelming majority would have other serious health problems. It is - it always was - a question of timing. Remember "flattening the curve"?
Comments