In retrospect, it’s clear that DeSantis — as well as governors in Texas, Arizona, California and a lot of other states — reopened too early because they too were swayed by their low death rates and were eager to get their economies back on track. They didn’t anticipate how opening bars, in particular, would spread the virus. They weren’t willing to get tough on people who refused to wear masks. Perhaps most important, they didn’t pay enough attention to the reproduction rate — that is, the estimate of the number of people each Covid-positive person would infect. (In Florida, according to one model, it is 1.42)
Nor did I. After my second Florida column, Felix Salmon, the financial journalist, tweeted: “I’m still unclear what exactly it is that you think DeSantis did that was so effective. Tell old people to be cautious?” His tweet caught me up short. I realized that I was giving the governor credit not because of any particular action he’d taken — other than sealing off nursing homes — but because so few Floridians had died. More likely, Florida was lucky rather than good.
Even now, with the staggering number of positive cases, DeSantis won’t issue a statewide mask mandate. Aside from bars, which he ordered closed, the governor has left decisions about shutting down businesses to the counties and cities. Early on, DeSantis took great pride in the low number of positive cases at The Villages, a huge retirement community in Central Florida with more than 120,000 residents.(2) He even cited it as an example of how the naysayers were wrong.
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