Vox
Florida now has the worst ongoing coronavirus outbreak in the country. Since the beginning of July, Covid-19 cases in the state have gone up nearly 60 percent, with hospitalizations and deaths rapidly rising as well. Florida now has 20 percent more daily new Covid-19 cases than Arizona, 70 percent more than Texas, and more than double California. Florida drew headlines on Sunday for surpassing the record for the highest number of new cases reported in one day, previously held by New York (though that was driven largely by Florida having much more testing than New York did at the peak of its outbreak). The percentage of positive tests over the previous week hit nearly 19 percent, which is almost four times the recommended maximum of 5 percent. The high rate — an indicator of how widespread infection is, as well as whether an area is conducting enough testing — suggests Florida still doesn’t have enough testing to match its Covid-19 outbreak. As bad as things are in Florida, the state is likely undercounting the number of cases. It wasn’t always going this way. Just weeks ago, Gov. Ron DeSantis made media rounds boasting about Florida’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, rebuking those who had criticized the state’s actions, and bragging that his state had managed to keep Covid-19 cases low despite a slower, less-aggressive lockdown and a quicker reopening than other places. DeSantis bragged about how quickly the state was able to reopen due to his great response to the pandemic, saying that “what we did in March and April is the equivalent of what New York will be or California, when they go to phase three” — in reference to California’s slower-moving phased plan for reopening. Now, though, experts say it’s that rapid reopening — mixed with public complacency that the virus had been defeated and lackluster action in the previous months — that led Florida to its current crisis. Florida “defiantly reopened in the name of rejuvenating their economy relatively early,” C. Brandon Ogbunu, a computational biologist at Yale, told me. “The prediction was quite clear that they would have a bad wave at some point.”