With Florida leading the nation in new COVID cases and with hospitalizations on the rise, the CDC is urging citizens to curb the spread of the delta variant by wearing masks.
Yet Gov. Ron DeSantis brought in a new “expert” to advise him on masks this week — a guy who tweeted earlier this year that anyone wearing a mask was “a retard.”
That word is pretty repulsive to most anyone who knows someone with special needs. Or just has a conscience. But if you found Los Angeles psychiatrist Mark McDonald’s “retard” comments amusing, you might also enjoy the drink koozies DeSantis is selling to fund his political committee. They say: “How the hell am I going to be able to drink a beer with a mask on?”
Yes, while the CDC is urging mask usage — and Florida ICUs are surging with patients in dire condition — DeSantis is selling mask-mocking koozies, two for $12.
If there’s a health crisis afoot, Florida’s governor doesn’t seem all that interested in addressing it.
Don’t take it from me. Take it from the head of infection prevention at UF Health in Jacksonville.
With his hospital filling up, he took to Twitter Monday to say the state’s response to this latest surge has been: “you’re on your own.”
Those four words may be the take-away for Florida: You’re on your own.
If we are to combat the latest surge, it will have to come from individual citizens, local leaders and private institutions. Because Florida’s political leadership is dismissive, mocking and M.I.A.
There’s little chance the mask-mockers will change their ways. DeSantis is literally trying to make money off playing too cool for masks. And I’m not sure anyone who proudly uses the R-word is ripe for enlightenment.
We’re going to have to solve this problem ourselves.
We have to get vaccinated. And we have to listen to the advice of real medical experts.
People like Dr. Christopher Hunter.
Hunter is Orlando Health’s chief quality officer. And right now, he’s dealing with hospitalizations and ICU counts “either at or slightly above any levels we have ever had since the pandemic began.”
Hunter said Wednesday the numbers are clearly troubling. But he also said we’re better positioned to address this pandemic than we were a year ago.
“This is the same pandemic, but we are in a very different place,” he said. “We know how to protect ourselves.”
We have vaccines available. There is no shortage of masks.
Hunter says we know what needs to be done. We just have to do it.
Fortunately for Central Florida, we’ve seen local institutions and leaders rise to the challenge before.
Way back in the spring of last year, it wasn’t state officials taking decisive action. It was local hospitals. And mayors. And responsible businesses.
Disney actually took a national lead, announcing early on that it was temporarily closing its parks until it felt it could get a handle on the crisis. That monumental step had nothing to do with Florida’s politicians.
This week, the cruise industry is stepping up. While DeSantis is fighting to allow cruise ships to ignore CDC guidelines when sailing from Florida, the cruise companies say they want to follow those guidelines. That’s encouraging.
On the local level, Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings holds regular briefings and seems to actively seek out advice from qualified experts. As a result, he issued an emergency order Wednesday that ordered vaccines for non-unionized county employees and urged (but didn’t mandate) masks for the public. Demings sure doesn’t seem eager for lockdowns. Honestly, I don’t know anyone who is.
I think you can make a cogent case that lockdowns weren’t and aren’t terribly effective — a point DeSantis began stressing after he ordered a statewide shutdown himself.
But I also haven’t seen the medical experts calling for lockdowns again. Instead, they’re urging people to get vaccinated and voluntarily mask up.
It seems like we should listen to them.
Orlando Health’s Dr. Hunter described the rise in hospitalizations at his system — 432 on Wednesday alone — as “a big, big problem.”
But he said we have solutions in front of us.
So let’s act on them.
Listen to the Dr. Hunters of the world. And other frontline doctors struggling to keep unvaccinated patients alive. And to the experts at the CDC.
Not the politicians or members of the Twitterati who mock the people who actually know what they’re talking about.