Pretty good article.
Here are some of my favorite quotes.
Those numbers mirror national trends. Majorities of Americans have consistently said they approve of how Biden has handled the pandemic, according to
recent Yahoo News/YouGov polling, giving him higher marks than on other issues. And
an August Yahoo News/YouGov poll showed that just 41 percent of Americans blame the Biden administration for “the new surge of COVID cases in the U.S.,” versus 67 percent who blame “Americans who refuse to wear masks and take other precautions” and 66 percent who blame “unvaccinated Americans.” As a result, 56 percent say the U.S. should be lifting coronavirus restrictions more slowly “given the emergence of the Delta variant”; just 12 percent say restrictions should be lifted more quickly.
At the time, many Americans hoped that so-called herd immunity was on the horizon and that vaccines would soon vanquish the virus. In that context, the hands-off vision of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, among other Republicans, looked alluring. No indoor mask mandates. No vaccine requirements. No more stress on families or businesses. Just live your life as if the pandemic was already over, and soon it would be.
Then came Delta. Now, a few months later, Florida has become one of the only states where more people are dying of COVID each day — long after free, safe and effective vaccines became widely available to all Americans age 12 or older — than during any previous wave of the virus. In fact, the Sunshine State is now recording
nearly twice as many daily COVID deaths (350 on average) than it was at last summer’s peak (185). No other state comes close.
n contrast, Californians are dying of COVID-19 at a lower rate today (103 per day) than last summer (140 per day), despite the fact that Delta is twice as transmissible as the initial strain of SARS-CoV-2, which was circulating in 2020. That’s the kind of progress you would expect after vaccination.
As Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, recently
tweeted, “Cumulatively, CA and FL had similar death rates until April 2021. The states then started separating. Now, cumulative deaths [are] 30% higher (per capita) in FL than CA.” If Florida had instead gone on to match California’s cumulative per capita death rate, about 11,000 Floridians who have succumbed to COVID would still be alive today.
Why the divergence? Florida’s full vaccination rate (54 percent) is only slightly lower than California’s (57 percent), so immunity is only part of the story. The same goes for demographics; Florida had more elderly residents than California last summer too.
According to Jha, the real problem has been Florida’s “abrogation of other public health measures.”
“CA continues masking, testing, pushing vax,” he explained. “FL? Not so much.”
During California’s bout with Delta, there have been no lockdowns, no business closures, no official curbs on indoor drinking or dining — just a general public bias toward caution that is both reflected and reinforced by indoor mask mandates (along with an emerging trend toward vaccine requirements, particularly for health, school and government employees).
In contrast, DeSantis doubled down on his opposition to mask and vaccine mandates when Delta took off, prohibiting local governments, local businesses and even local school districts from implementing such policies — and therefore discouraging Floridians themselves from behaving more cautiously.
As a result, the final choice for voters — as dramatized by the South’s horrific summer surge and hammered home by Elder’s vow to “fight any and all vaccine and mask mandates at [the] state and local level” — was between continuing to exercise the kind of basic precautions that already seemed to helping California keep Delta in check and letting the virus rip like DeSantis & Co., just as kids head back to school.
With polls showing Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom ahead by double digits on the eve of California’s recall election, voters there seem ready to reject the laissez-faire COVID-19 policies that have failed to contain huge summer surges in Republican-led states such as Florida.
news.yahoo.com