Gyms have been closed since Gov. Ron DeSantis issued a statewide safer-at-home order last month to slow the spread of coronavirus. That executive order expired when the state started the first phase of reopening last week.
But Florida’s gyms – at this point – aren’t allowed to reopen until the state reaches Phase Two of the governor’s reopening plan.
A group of 20 to 30 people gathered outside the Pinellas County Courthouse in Clearwater on Monday morning to protest that, calling for gyms to reopen now so employees can get back to work and customers can return...
It popped up on my Twitter like this:
You should read the retorts. Sad but expected.
I should point out the demographics of my olde stomping grounds: Pinellas' current population - if these protesters were genuinely from the area - is about 969,000 peeps. Clearwater itself is currently around 104,000. Even with that specific a sample (and with Clearwater the county seat, they could have drawn from Tarpon Springs to Gulfport) that's barely nothing.
Seriously . Thirty protesters tops isn't even enough to qualify for a brawl at a Dunedin biker bar.
Anywho, the lack of massive protests is of interest because one thing the national punditry is puzzling over is how below the COVID-19 infection and death rates the Sunshine State has been since mid-March. Considering how 1) Governor DeSantis dropped the ball on early closure announcements, 2) the beaches in particular were open for Spring Break, raising the ire of everyone else in the univeres, and 3) our state is particularly vulnerable with the high number of elders who are most threatened by any pandemic, the fact that our rates are nowhere near similar cases like New York or Georgia caught enough attention even back in April at Vox, and the local paper Tampa Bay Times did an article recently about it (via Adam Playford, Kathleen McGrory, Steve Contorno, Caitlin Johnston and Zachary T. Sampson):
Medical professionals saw a trajectory of cases that tracked alarmingly close to the early days of the outbreak in New York. They implored Gov. Ron DeSantis to swiftly shut down the state. He waited two weeks.
After the state shut down, the predicted tsunami did not arrive. Temporary hospitals sit unused. Ventilators were never in short supply. The death count, though tragically nearing 1,800 today, remains short of what many feared...
The analysis indicates that while Florida’s politicians debated beach closings and stay-at-home orders, residents took matters into their own hands.
By the time each county shut down, there had been large reductions in activity, the cell phone data shows. People in the worst-hit counties were overwhelmingly staying home weeks before DeSantis’ order went out — and even before the much-earlier orders issued by local governments...
I can personally attest to that from where I live. When the news started growing back in January, a lot of public social areas near me saw a drop in turnout. One harbinger IMHO was all the horror stories about cruise ships getting quarantined (Florida is a major departure point with a lot of seniors taking those trips). By first week of February, the local multiplex was mostly empty. When I went to see Birds of Prey its opening weekend, I saw the smallest turnout for a blockbuster comic book movie in ages and it was for a movie that was actually well-received and hyped. I knew right then people were avoiding each other.
And I work in a library, with reasonable attendance numbers especially in the winter when the snow-birds are here... and yet the door count and circ numbers and computer users (!) were halved by the first week of February. March was no better right up until we got the city order to close for public safety.
The Times reporters went to look for data to back up the anecdotes. They used tracking methods to see where the people went (and didn't go):
Floridians, it turned out, weren’t waiting.
They severely cut back on going out in public before any government forced them to, according to a Times analysis of cell phone tracking data.
The Times obtained information from Google and two other private companies that use location data from apps on millions of cell phones to determine whether people are socially isolating.
Each company’s data works differently. But it all showed the same thing: In every county in the state, significant decreases in movement began before shutdown orders were issued.
Miami-Dade has had the largest outbreak in Florida. But in the five days preceding the county’s March 26 stay-at-home order, more than half the phones tracked by one of the firms never traveled more than a mile. That represented a drop of more than 80 percent compared to data the firm, Descartes Labs, collected from mid-February to early March.
Data from another company, Unacast, showed that the average distance traveled in the county had been cut nearly in half. Visits to businesses Unacast classified as nonessential, based on guidelines issued by various state governments, dropped at least 65 percent.
Similar patterns repeated across Florida...
That is not what epidemiologists expected, said Thomas Hladish, a University of Florida research scientist who specializes in disease modeling and has been advising the state on the outbreak.
"What you see in Florida is that people started social distancing much earlier,” Hladish said. “Whether it’s because their schools closed or they were watching the news, they seemed to have started to act before they were explicitly told, ‘Don’t go out.’ That early action is almost certainly the biggest factor in why things weren’t worse here.”
In short: DeSantis and the other state leaders may have been idiots, but the rest of the state wasn't. We may be crazy, but we're not THAT crazy. So that's my eyewitness testimony.
Back to the Times article.
The state’s sprawling cities and random strokes of good fortune may also have worked in Florida’s favor. But public health experts warned that as Florida reopens, its good luck could change with one asymptomatic disease carrier stepping into a large nursing home.
"The thing that is really easy — because this is silent and because it may not be immediately impacting you — is you get really complacent about it,” said Jeffrey Shaman, professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University. “There is a lot of opportunity for this virus to grow exponentially, if it's given the opportunity."
Already, residents’ willingness to stay home appears to be shifting...
The sad news?
Even with all this going on, the political pressure to re-open things faster than before is growing. It's not the 30 protesters along Ft. Harrison Ave., it's the lobbyists and GOP leadership in Tallahassee rushing things without concern that we don't have enough testing kits and we're still not ready for a bigger wave of infected.
If you look at the Times charts, they all show the county numbers ticking upward this May, when more and more people chafed at the social isolation. Now with a Phase 1 restart that's reopened a number of businesses - as long as staffs and customers practice masks, gloves, and sanitizing guidelines - we could see a greater uptick as asymptomatic people mingle with the yet-untouched.
I would like to think most of the Floridian residents around me are still savvy enough to recognize the risks. We're nowhere near the safe levels of testing and protection that would justify going to sporting events, concerts, movie theaters, biker bars, and gyms. It's not an impulse toward "freedom" that should push us towards such self-defeating urges. It better be a desire to avoid harming others, a modicum of responsibility to our loved ones and everyone else's.
This is gonna be a rough month in Florida.
Please, fellow crazy folk. Don't go too far into the madness.
2 comments:
This is been very well-thought-out and I think you've drawn some valid conclusions.
That's the thing about Fergus' "open the country and damn the corpses" PR initiative, the death and destruction is all around us, and most people aren't gonna resume public activity until such time as the risk of a hideous death from doing so goes way down.
Even (most of) the idiots are smart enough to figure that out.
-Doug in Sugar Pine
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