Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

In a vastly unsurprising piece of news, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has published two studies that show masks can help protect children from COVID-19 and prevent large outbreaks in schools. The result holds even when there is a high level of community transmission and the highly contagious delta variant is present.  (Spotted via Daniel Politi, Slate, CDC: Schools With Mask Mandates See Fewer COVID-19 Outbreaks. )

Of course here in Florida, the DeSantis presidential campaign strategy of killing off as many Floridians as it takes to satisfy the cravings of the red-meat Trumpist GOP means that the state of Florida punishes school districts that put their students first and require masks.

Not only that, but in the latest development, DeSantis and his new weird, weird, state surgeon general, have announced that asymptomatic Florida students exposed to COVID do not have to quarantine — they can attend school if they want — presumably also without masks?

So, once again, DeSantis supports a pro-COVID policy.  And the state suffers for it.

Here is Jon Authors in his “Points of Return” newsletter for Sept. 16, 2021:

Looking at the numbers for Texas and Florida, the two large states where Republican governors have vocally refused to enforce social distancing and where there is great skepticism toward the vaccine, the results are startling. I compiled the following chart the same way as the earlier comparison of the U.S. and the U.K., indexing both states’ death rates to the peak in the first wave, which in the southern U.S. came in August last year. As with the U.S. and the U.K., the pattern was remarkably similar until early this summer. Since then, Texas has endured a clear-cut third wave. The experience in Florida is remarkable, and suggests that there is more to the problem than vaccine hesitancy:

Unlike virtually anywhere else in the Western world, Florida is in the midst of a third wave much worse than the first two. Without getting too political, this makes the state’s current policies toward the virus very hard to understand; and also makes the current death toll look like the result of deliberate decisions, both by politicians and individuals. This is only a hypothesis, and it looks as though there is more to the Floridian third wave than resistance to vaccines, but numbers like this help explain why investors are calm.

Let me repeat the key bit: “Without getting too political, this makes the state’s current policies toward the virus very hard to understand; and also makes the current death toll look like the result of deliberate decisions, both by politicians and individuals.”

Thank you, Ron DeSantis!