How Florida Ended Up Getting Crushed by Covid
Florida avoided the worst of the Covid pandemic for more than a year. So what happened this summer?
The current story of the pandemic in the United State is, with few exceptions, pretty straightforward: while cases are rising most everywhere, hospitalizations and deaths (which are the things we should be most concerned about and paying real attention to) have skyrocketed in states with relatively low vaccination rates, and have remained mostly under control in states with high ones. And this was a predictable outcome, given that we know the Covid vaccines provide good protection against infection but exceptional protection against serious illness and death.
This weekend’s big New York Times story on why Florida has been slammed by Covid over the past month, though, tries to complicate this narrative, and offer a more nuanced account of why the state has seen tens of thousands of people hospitalized for Covid, and thousands die of it. It’s an understandable goal, but in the process the story leaves readers with a distorted picture of how Florida — and in particular Governor Ron DeSantis — has tried to manage the pandemic. Even more problematically, it leaves readers with the impression that Florida’s experience shows that mass vaccination is not enough to keep a state from…
