Though Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Florida) has spent the past several months touting his handling of the coronavirus pandemic in his state, state workers are expressing concern about how the virus is being handled in their offices.
Reporting from The Tampa Bay Times reveals that several state workers have told their union leaders that they aren’t being made aware about co-workers who have been infected, in many cases until 14 days after those who test positive for COVID-19 have left the office. Democratic lawmakers in Florida have also said they are getting complaints from state workers who fear being punished for sounding the alarm on their workplace conditions, where it is often the case that there are little-to-no mitigation efforts in place to prevent the spread of the virus.
“Many state employees live in fear of making any noise. They call us and don’t even say what agency they’re calling from,” Sen. Loranne Ausley (D-Florida) told the publication.
Like much of the country, state workers in Florida began working from home at the start of the pandemic, in March of 2020. However, in October of that year, DeSantis ordered that state workers return to their offices, where masks and social distancing are not required.
Since then, many state offices have been forced to temporarily close due to coronavirus outbreaks. For example, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission offices were closed in July, with a sign in front of the building stating they were doing so due to COVID-19.
Workers have consistently been left in the dark when it comes to the virus, and often aren’t informed of critical developments until it is too late for them to take precautions for their health and the health of their families. Because the state of Florida doesn’t track COVID cases, even information on where workers are contracting COVID and how many workers have gotten infected is not available to them.
Vicki Hall, president of AFSCME Florida Council 79, told theTimes that workers are frustrated with their current situation, and suggested DeSantis is largely to blame.
“The workers are very scared. The governor wants everything open and running,” Hall said.
What’s more, state workers’ fear of retribution for speaking out is well founded. DeSantis has long promoted monoclonal antibody treatments over vaccinations for how to best prevent hospitalization for COVID (in spite of evidence showing the opposite is true). After journalist Brendan Farrington noted in August that the governor may benefit both politically and financially from lying to the public, DeSantis Press Secretary Christina Pushaw threatened to put him “on blast” on social media if he didn’t change the content of his article. She continued to disparage Farrington’s reporting — while providing no evidence to prove the governor’s claims — even as he was bombarded with death threats from DeSantis supporters.
“Waking up in the middle of the night to see death threats and hate messages from people about a story @GovRonDeSantis office said is factually true,” Farrington tweeted at the time. “For your sake, I hope government doesn’t threaten your safety.”
A Florida lawmaker wants to review all vaccine mandates in the state — not just mandates for the coronavirus vaccine.
Republican State Sen. Manny Diaz Jr. is a vociferous opponent of vaccine mandates to reduce the spread of COVID-19, and voted in favor of a bill earlier this year that bans businesses from requiring proof of vaccination from customers. (However, he has expressed openness to allowing employers to require their workers to be vaccinated.)
Yet Diaz isn’t content limiting his broadsides to COVID vaccine requirements alone. According to reporting from Florida Politics, Diaz believes it’s time to “review” mandates for all vaccines, including the vaccine requirements that schools have had in place for decades.
Currently, K-12 public schools in Florida require a number of vaccinations before students can attend classes, including for protection against diphtheria, tetanus, polio, mumps, rubella, chickenpox, hepatitis B and measles. Some of these ailments were once responsible for thousands of childhood deaths each year. Before the polio vaccine was developed in the 1950s, more than 1,800 children died of polio per year in the U.S and thousands were permanently disabled, while around 432 children died per year of measles before a vaccine became widely available in the 1960s.
In recent years, misinformation has made vaccine hesitancy among parents more common, and there has been a resurgence in small, localized measles outbreaks. In 2019 alone, the U.S saw around 1,251 cases of the highly contagious virus, the highest number recorded since 1992.
In spite of his desire for a review, Diaz has conceded that vaccines which have stood the test of time may not need such deep examination. But given the dangerous rhetoric Diaz has peddled throughout the pandemic, there is cause for concern over whether his “review” of vaccine mandates will be based on science — or whether they’ll favor expanding so-called “parental freedoms” over protecting the broader population.
A Republican state lawmaker in Florida is proposing a bill that would copy the state of Texas’s restrictive new anti-abortion law, which has so far avoided scrutiny from the United States Supreme Court by allowing enforcement of its provisions to be carried out by private citizens.
The proposed Florida law would act similarly, letting individuals, rather than the state, take action by suing people who provide abortion services or otherwise help someone obtain an abortion — a medical procedure that is a person’s right to access for any reason.
The legislation, filed on Wednesday by state Rep. Webster Barnaby (R), would ban all abortions in the state after a so-called “fetal heartbeat” is detected, granting exceptions only for rape, incest, or considerations for the health of the pregnant person. Like the Texas state statute, the bill would incentivize individuals to sue doctors who provide abortions — as well as anyone else who aids a pregnant person seeking an abortion — for amounts of up to $10,000, which many have described as a situation created to incentivize vigilantes and bounty hunters.
Gov. Ron DeSantis’s office also suggested it would be open to the bill, after describing the concept proposed by Texas as “interesting” earlier this month.
“The Governor’s office is aware that the bill was filed today and like all legislation, we will be monitoring it as it moves through the legislative process in the coming months,” a spokesperson for the Republican governor said.
Democratic lawmakers are adamantly opposed to the bill, with State Rep. Anna Eskamani (D) noting it was in violation of both federal regulations and Florida’s constitutional provisions on privacy.
“This is not a partisan issue, and so to see a Republican man file a bill that is so extreme, that strips away my bodily autonomy and that of my peers, is a slap in the face to half of this state and anyone who cares about women’s health,” Eskamani said.
Indeed, polling indicates that most people in the U.S. are opposed to laws like the one implemented in Texas, which Republicans in Florida appear to be heading toward endorsing. For instance, a recent Monmouth University poll found that 70 percent of Americans opposed the Texas anti-abortion law, while only 22 percent said they supported it.
The Tampa Housing Authority along with Baker Barrios Architects and Property Markets Group announced a “master plan” for the Robles Park Village which is set to include over 1,000 new houses, resource facilities, and a Zion Cemetery memorial site. The Tampa Housing Authority reports that 85 percent of the new development will be “affordable rental housing” while the remaining 15 percent is set to be at market-rate or higher, with 77 luxury townhouses lining the property. A resident, tells a different story: “We still don’t know what’s going on!”
A Florida judge ruled on Wednesday that the state must stop enforcing Gov. Ron DeSantis’s ban on mask mandates as the state attempts to make their case that the ban should stay in place.
Leon County Circuit Judge John C. Cooper said that the state’s argument for the ban was flimsy, emphasizing that masks are important in stopping the spread of the virus. “We’re not in normal times. We are in a pandemic,” he said. In issuing the ban, he said, the state was overstepping its authority.
“We have a variant that’s more infectious and more dangerous to children than the one we had last year,” Cooper said, siding with parents who challenged the ban. “We’re in a non-disputed pandemic situation with threats to young children who, at least based on the evidence, have no way to avoid this unless to stay home and isolate themselves. I think everybody agrees that’s not good for them.” The state swiftly filed an appeal against Cooper’s decision.
This is the second time that Cooper has ruled against the mandate. The first time was two weeks ago, when the judge said that the order defies the state’s constitution, which guarantees a right to safe schools. The state had filed an appeal against the ruling, allowing the mask mandate ban to go on temporarily until Wednesday’s ruling shot it down again, with Cooper saying that he does not believe the state’s appeal will be successful.
Now that a court has shot down the appeal, it can’t be enforced, pending the decision of the state’s appeal. That means, according to NPR, that the state’s efforts to defund and fine school districts defying the mask mandate ban are also on hold for now.
The case next goes in front of the Tallahassee 1st District Court of Appeals. DeSantis, unlike Cooper, is confident that the state’s appeal will be successful. “What we’ve found is in the trial courts in Tallahassee, state and federal, we typically lose if there’s a political component to it, but then in the appeals court we almost always win,” DeSantis said Wednesday.
“I don’t know why the masks have politics around it,” the governor also said. But mask-wearing has been politicized by DeSantis’s own party; early in the pandemic, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) began recommending that people wear masks to prevent the spread of the virus, it was Republicans who ridiculed and bucked that recommendation.
Donald Trump was one of the first prominent Republicans to come out against wearing a mask, despite the gravity of the burgeoning pandemic and the scientific evidence that masks were effective at preventing spread of the virus. Since then, it has always been the Republicans spreading disinformation about masks and the severity of the pandemic.
DeSantis himself has participated wholeheartedly in the politicization of masks. In his executive order barring mask mandates, he wrote that “forcing students to wear masks lacks a well-grounded scientific justification.” But his office cherry-picked evidence for that claim, citing a preliminary study from Brown University that even the study’s authors wrote did not offer conclusive evidence. Meanwhile, DeSantis has ignored several other studies showing that masking is effective in protecting children in schools.
At least 13 staff members within the Miami-Dade County public school district have died due to coronavirus since the middle of last month, a union leader said.
“These were extraordinary educators and people, and their loss is being felt throughout the community,” Hernandez-Mats said.
The known deaths included four teachers, seven school bus drivers, a security monitor and a cafeteria worker. None of those individuals had been vaccinated.
Noting that misinformation has created a lot of fear in the community, particularly among marginalized or underserved groups of people, Hernandez-Mats also said that all 13 of those who had died were Black. Vaccine rates in Black and Brown communities are notably lower throughout the U.S., due partially to hesitancy about the vaccine related to historical medical atrocities and the distrust that remains because of them, but also largely because of issues related to accessibility to the vaccines themselves within nonwhite communities.
In response to the distressing news, Hernandez-Mats and other leaders in the community coordinated a pop-up vaccination site on Tuesday, in part to honor those school staff members who had died. Around 40 individuals showed up to receive their first vaccination shots within the first few hours of the event’s opening, the county union president said.
Florida has been struggling with coronavirus for the past several weeks. Its daily average of new cases being identified is 65 percent higher than the U.S. average, and the number of people dying each day because of the virus is more than 3.5 times higher than the national rate as well.
In spite of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R) reluctance to push for vaccinations among his state’s residents, a number of studies have shown that obtaining a vaccine for COVID-19 remains the best way to prevent contracting the virus as well as avoiding the need for hospitalization.
New research based on data from three separate locations in the U.S., for example, demonstrates that vaccinated people are far less likely to get infected than was previously assumed about breakthrough cases. New research shows that only around one in every 5,000 vaccinated individuals tests positive for a “breakthrough” case of coronavirus per day. In Seattle, one of the areas examined by the study, an unvaccinated person was around 10 times more likely to test positive for coronavirus than a vaccinated individual.
Other studies have shown that vaccines, beyond reducing the chances of getting the virus, also drastically reduce the possibility of needing hospitalization. Unvaccinated individuals are 29 times more likely to require a trip to the hospital to get treated for coronavirus, a study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found. Additionally, those who are vaccinated but still get infected with COVID are less likely to spread it unlike those who are unvaccinated and contract the virus, another study found.
After conservative justices in the Supreme Court upheld Texas Republicans’ draconian abortion ban this week, GOP lawmakers in other states are already considering similar infringements on reproductive rights, despite the ban’s unpopularity.
Republican officials in Arkansas, South Dakota and Florida are looking into how Texas’s “bounty hunter” method of enforcing the ban could be used to bar people from accessing the vital health care procedure in their states.
The Florida Senate president, Republican Wilton Simpson, told local media outlet WFLA that the state GOP is working on a bill already that would ban abortions as early as six weeks into pregnancy — essentially a near-total ban like that of Texas.
One Republican lawmaker in Arkansas has already filed a 6-week abortion ban similar to Texas’s; and, in South Dakota, GOP Gov. Kristi Noem said Thursday that she’s directing people in her administration to ensure that her state also has “the strongest” anti-choice laws possible.
As Axios writes, there are about a dozen other states that have tried to implement similar abortion laws recently but have had their efforts shot down by the courts. North Dakota, Iowa, Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia recently tried passing restrictive laws that were shot down by courts. Other states like Ohio had laws that were temporarily blocked by courts.
Conservative justices in the Supreme Court could soon overturnRoe v. Wade across the country, which, if it occurs, would surely spark a wave of anti-abortion policies across states that haven’t already tried to pass such bills. It’s unclear whether the Supreme Court will issue a sweeping overturn of the decades-old abortion rights precedent, but the Texas decision blatantly guts it.
Critics say that the abortion ban — which effectively within Texas denies the reproductive freedoms that Roe v. Wade sought to protect, without expressly seeking to overturn the ruling — is cruel not only because it rescinds people’s rights, but also because of its “private right of action” enforcement mechanism. The law allows any private citizen to sue someone who aids a pregnant person in getting an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy — or well before the vast majority of people even know that they’re pregnant.
If the defendant is found to have aided the abortion in any way, they will be ordered to pay court fees and $10,000 or more to the plaintiff. This will have a vast chilling effect on abortions in the state, as health care providers, abortion clinics and any family members or even Uber drivers who assist the pregnant person in obtaining an abortion could get sued, creating an atmosphere of terror around the procedure in the state.
Banning abortion is incredibly dangerous, and in countries that have adopted such bans, many people die from trying to obtain an abortion illegally. Texas’s law is incredibly strict, with no exceptions for rape and incest and very few exceptions for medical emergencies. If other states adopt similar policies, they could also severely endanger the life of pregnant people both during and after the pregnancy.
But Republicans may run into roadblocks when trying to implement such policies. The “bounty hunter” method of enforcing abortion and the abortion ban in general will likely end up being challenged in courts by pro-choice groups. On top of that, the GOP hasn’t even been publicizing what is an ostensible win for its anti-choice agenda — perhaps because abortion bans are unpopular, and near-total abortion bans even more so.
Democrats in the House have said they’re working on passing a bill to guarantee abortion access for all across the country. But the bill faces essentially zero odds of passing the Senate, so long as the filibuster and its defenders stay in place.
Immediately after a Florida state circuit judge issued his final ruling against a state ban on mask mandates in schools, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Florida) appealed the decision, placing a stay on it in order to continue preventing Florida schools from requiring masks.
Leon County Circuit Court Judge John Cooper ruled last week that the Florida governor’s executive order banning masking rules made by school districts across the state (which were issued in order to stem the spread of coronavirus among students and staff) was improperly utilized by the state Board of Education to enforce the Parents’ Bill of Rights, a bill signed into law by DeSantis earlier this summer that gave the governor the power to stop schools from issuing such policies, ostensibly on the basis of protecting parental freedoms.
Cooper noted in his initial finding that the Parents’ Bill of Rights has two parts to it: It stipulates that government leaders aren’t allowed to “infringe on the fundamental rights of a parent” regarding a child’s upbringing, education, health care choices and mental health, but it also asserts that school districts are still allowed to impose “reasonable and necessary” rules if there is a “compelling state interest” to do so.
The actions taken by the Board of Education and the DeSantis administration to prevent schools from requiring masks stepped outside of the law’s scope, Cooper said in his final ruling, which he issued on Thursday, noting that the statute doesn’t grant the governor the right to make a “blanket” masking mandate ban across the state — that each district’s rules have to be examined individually and responded to by the state if it believes a violation of parental rights has occurred.
“The Defendants do not have authority under this law to enforce a before the fact of policy adoption blanket mandate against a mandatory face mask policy by a local school board,” Cooper said. “This statute does not support a state-wide order or action interfering with the constitutionally provided authority of local school districts to provide for the safety and health of the children based on the unique facts on the ground in a particular county.”
The DeSantis administration’s attempt to impose a statewide ban on school masking rules appeared to violate local school boards’ right to due process, the judge found. Districts “are not required to secure permission in advance to adopt a policy,” Cooper added.
Cooper’s final ruling enjoined the state from being able to take actions to enforce “a blanket ban on face mask mandates” without giving districts “their due process rights.” However, immediately after Cooper’s order was issued, DeSantis appealed it. Per state law, an appeal from a state office or official automatically results in a stay of a court’s ruling, meaning Cooper’s ruling is not going to be enforced, unless a higher court orders it to be.
The DeSantis administration has already placed penalties on two school districts that defied his state mask mandate ban, denying salaries to administrators who have implemented rules on masking in their schools. The Biden administration has promised to help any district across the country that faces such penalties, from DeSantis or other governors trying to impose them.
Florida residents largely disagree with the ban on mask mandates that DeSantis is trying to force onto schools, according to a recent Quinnipiac University poll conducted last month. That survey found that 73 percent of Floridians believe that coronavirus is a “serious problem” for the state, and a separate question shows that 59 percent of respondents describe the current situation with the pandemic as “out of control.”
Three out of five respondents in the poll (60 percent) said they support the idea that students, teachers and staff should be required to wear masks in schools, while only 36 percent oppose. A majority of respondents (63 percent) also rejected the notion often pushed by DeSantis that mask-wearing is an issue of “personal freedom” for individuals or parents to decide on, instead aligning with the idea that it’s a public health matter.
The Florida Department of Health (DOH) has changed the way it reports deaths from coronavirus in the state to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a move that some have said gives the false appearance of a decline in pandemic-related deaths.
The Miami Herald reports that Florida changed its methodology in its reports of COVID-related deaths earlier this month. Rather than providing data on deaths after their causes have been determined, the state is now reporting deaths on the date that they occurred.
The seemingly insignificant change has drastic repercussions. If Florida had continued using the old method of reporting deaths, it’s tally on Monday would have shown an average of 262 daily deaths in the state for the previous seven days. Instead, it only reported 46 “new deaths” per day for the previous seven days, a measure that is about 82 percent lower than what it ought to be.
SPECIAL REORT: As cases ballooned in August, the Florida Department of Health changed the way it reported death data to the CDC, giving the appearance of a pandemic in decline, an analysis of Florida data by the @MiamiHerald and @elnuevoherald found. https://t.co/wbwSF5cbO3
The discrepancy comes from reporting deaths on the day they occur before the cause of death — such as COVID-19 — is definitively recorded. Death certificates typically take days, sometimes weeks, to complete, and the numbers that get reported “day-of” only reflect cases that are fully known to have been COVID-related.
Christina Pushaw, the press secretary for Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Florida), defended the change, calling The Herald’s reporting “disinformation.”
“Florida didn’t change its COVID-19 data. [DOH] now reports deaths by actual date of death because it’s the most precise and accurate way to report deaths,” she claimed in a tweet.
But Shivani Patel, a social epidemiologist and a professor at Emory University, told The Herald that the change was “extremely problematic,” adding that it makes the state “look like we are doing better than we are.”
Changing to the new way of reporting coronavirus deaths leaves too many things up to people’s imaginations, including whether things are improving or not, Patel explained.
“It shouldn’t be left to the public, to scientists, national policy makers or the media to guess as to what these numbers are,” Patel said.
Nikki Fried, the state’s Agriculture Commissioner and Democratic candidate hoping to run against DeSantis next year, also voiced dissatisfaction with the change, calling it “deeply troubling.”
The Florida Department of Education on Monday announced it was withholding funds from at least two school districts in the state in response to their rules on masking for students and staff. It’s doing this in spite of last week’s court ruling, which said that the districts were within their rights to make such rules.
The salaries of Broward County and Alachua County school district officials will be withheld, said Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran, because the mask rules they implemented, designed to help keep students and staff safe by preventing the spread of coronavirus, went against an order from Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Florida) banning districts from making such rules.
“The withholding of funds will continue monthly until each school board complies with state law and rule,” Corcoran said.
“What’s unacceptable is the politicians who have raised their right hands and pledged, under oath, to uphold the Constitution but are not doing so,” Corcoran added.
Yet a ruling from Leon County Circuit Judge John Cooper on Friday disagreed with the notion that mask rules in schools were unconstitutional, as Corcoran has claimed. Indeed, Cooper sided with parents and school administrators in the state, who had sued the DeSantis administration using the very law that allowed the governor to issue the mask mandate ban in the first place.
Noting that the Parents’ Bill of Rights created by the Republican legislature and signed into law in June by Gov. DeSantis doesn’t allow government leaders to “infringe on the fundamental rights of a parent” regarding a child’s upbringing, education, health care choices and mental health “without demonstrating that such action is reasonable and necessary to achieve a compelling state interest,” Judge Cooper said that the state had not met that standard.
“My ruling in this case, if you want to put it in one sentence, is, I am enforcing the bill passed by the Legislature and requiring that anyone who uses that bill to follow all provisions and not part of the provisions,” Cooper said.
The brazen move by the Florida Education Department also comes as the U.S. Department of Education, through its civil rights office, launched investigations into five states that have issued similar mask mandate bans on localities throughout the country. That investigation so far does not include Florida, Texas, Arkansas and Arizona, due to court decisions and other factors that have not allowed those states’ bans to be fully implemented.
“Some politicians are trying to turn public safety measures — that is, children wearing masks in school — into political disputes for their own political gain,” Biden said earlier this month of governors who were issuing mask mandate bans. “We are not going to sit by as governors try to block and intimidate educators protecting our children.”
Two state government websites in Georgia recently stopped posting updates on covid-19 cases in prisons and long-term care facilities, just as the dangerous delta variant was taking hold.
Data has been disappearing recently in other states as well.
Florida, for example, now reports covid cases, deaths and hospitalizations once a week, instead of daily, as before.
Both states, along with the rest of the South, are battling high infection rates.
Public health experts are voicing concern about the pullback of covid information. Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, called the trend “not good for government and the public” because it gives the appearance of governments “hiding stuff.”
A month ago, the Georgia agency that runs state prisons stopped giving public updates on the number of new covid cases among inmates and staff members. The Department of Corrections, in explaining this decision, cited its successful vaccination rates and “a declining number of covid-19 cases among staff and inmates.”
Now, a month later, Georgia has among the highest covid infection rates in the U.S. — along with one of the lowest vaccination rates. But the corrections department hasn’t resumed posting case data on its website.
When asked by KHN about the covid situation in prisons, department spokesperson Joan Heath said Monday that it currently has 308 active cases among inmates.
“We will make a determination whether to begin reposting the daily covid dashboard over the next few weeks, if the current statewide surge is sustained,” Heath said.
Another state website, run by the Department of Public Health, no longer links to a listing of the number of covid cases among residents and staffers of nursing homes and other long-term care residences by facility. The data grid, launched early in the pandemic, gave a running total of long-term care cases and deaths from the virus.
Asked about the lack of online information, public health officials directed a reporter to another agency, the Department of Community Health, which explained that covid information on nursing homes could be found on a federal health website. But locating and navigating that link can be difficult.
“Residents and families cannot easily find this information,” said Melanie McNeil, the state’s long-term care ombudsman. “It used to be easily accessible.”
Georgia gives updates on overall numbers of covid cases, hospitalizations and deaths in the state five days a week but has recently stopped its weekend covid reporting.
Other states also have cut back their public case reporting, despite the nation being engulfed in a fourth, delta-driven covid surge.
Florida had issued daily reports on cases, deaths and hospitalizations until the rate of positive test results dropped in June. Even when caseloads soared in July and August, the state stuck with weekly reporting.
Florida has been accused of being less than transparent with covid health data. Newspapers have sued or threatened to sue the state several times for medical examiner reports, long-term care data, prison data and weekly covid reports the state received from the White House.
Florida Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried, a Democrat running for governor in 2022, has repeatedly questioned Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ decision to delay the release of public data on covid cases and has called for restoring daily reporting of covid data.
Nebraska discontinued its daily covid dashboard June 30, then recently resumed reporting, but only weekly. Iowa also reports weekly; Michigan, three days a week.
Public health experts said full information is vital for a public dealing with an emergency such as the pandemic — similar to the government reports needed during a hurricane.
“All the public health things we do are dependent on trust and transparency,” Benjamin said.
A government, when removing public data, should provide a link redirecting people to where they can get that data, he said. And if a state doesn’t have enough staff members to provide regular data, he said, that argues for investment in staff and technology.
People in prisons and long-term care facilities, living in close quarters indoors, are especially vulnerable to infectious diseases such as covid.
“They are usually hotbeds of disease,” said Amber Schmidtke, a microbiologist who tracks covid in Georgia. Family members “want to know what’s going on in there.”
Prison data has been removed or reduced in several states, according to the UCLA School of Law’s COVID Behind Bars Data Project, which tracks the spread of covid in prisons, jails and detention facilities.
The group said Alaska provides only monthly updates on covid cases in such facilities, while Florida stopped reporting new data in June.
When Georgia stopped reporting on covid in prisons, the project found, only 24% of employees reported being vaccinated. Prison workers can spread the virus inside the facilities and then in their homes and the community.
The group reports that at least 93 incarcerated people and four staffers have died of covid in Georgia and that the state has the second-highest case fatality rate, or percentage of those with reported infections who die, among all state and federal prison systems.
“Right now, if there was a massive outbreak in prisons, there would be no way to know it,” said Hope Johnson of the COVID Behind Bars Data Project.
Recent Facebook posts point to cases at Smith State Prison in southeastern Georgia.
Heath, when asked about cases there, said Tuesday that the prison has 19 active covid cases and its transitional center has one.
Mayor Bernie Weaver of Glennville, the Tattnall County town where the prison is located, said he hasn’t been told about recent covid cases at the prison. But he noted that Tattnall itself has had a spike in cases. The county has a 26% vaccination rate, among the lowest in the state.
KHN Senior Correspondent Phil Galewitz contributed to this report.
Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, whose state has been devastated by the coronavirus pandemic in recent months, believes that President Joe Biden should take leadership cues from him on how to best approach the crisis, he suggested on Wednesday.
“We are the first state to start the treatment centers for monoclonal antibodies. We’re having great success with that,” DeSantis claimed. “That should have been a bigger plan, a bigger part of this whole response throughout the country from the beginning.”
“At the end of the day, [Biden] is trying to find a way to distract from the failures of his presidency,” DeSantis added.
Monoclonal antibody treatment is an effective way to reduce a patient’s chances of needing hospitalization. However, experts agree that preventative measures, including vaccines for protection against the virus, are a much better strategy for combating the spread of COVID.
As DeSantis has dubiously described Biden’s leadership regarding coronavirus as a “failure,” his own state is facing much worse rates of infection compared to the rest of the nation. Florida is currently seeing 101 new cases of the virus every day, on average, per every 100,000 residents, a rate that is more than double what the U.S. is seeing (46 new cases per 100,000). The hospitalization rate in Florida is also 2.75 times higher than the current rate for the rest of the nation.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is seeing his approval ratings plunge after enacting and seeking to enforce stringent measures that prevent schools in his state from taking actions that would prevent the spread of coronavirus.
After several school districts said they would keep their masking rules in place, DeSantis threatened to withhold the pay of district officials in punishment for their defiance, even though they were acting in the interest of public health. (The Biden administration has since said that it will aid those districts by paying for any penalties DeSantis imposes on them).
Now, new polling shows that DeSantis may have harmed himself politically over his stubborn stance on masking and other issues related to the pandemic.
A Political Matrix/The Listener Group survey published this week asked Florida residents whether they had positive or negative views of the governor over his handling of the pandemic. Just 43.3 percent said they viewed DeSantis favorably on that issue, while 53.8 percent said they had an unfavorable opinion of him.
The dissatisfaction felt by Florida voters has put DeSantis at a disadvantage against his potential political opponents, as he is up for reelection in 2022. In a hypothetical matchup against former governor and current U.S. Rep. Charlie Crist (D-Florida), DeSantis would lose the governorship, earning just over 43 percent of the vote versus Crist, who would get close to 57 percent, the poll found.
DeSantis also fares poorly against Florida Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried. In that matchup, Fried would win with 53.7 percent of the vote, with DeSantis attaining just 46.3 percent, if the election were held today.
DeSantis, who is viewed as a potential nominee to the Republican Party’s ticket in the 2024 presidential election, has overseen what many perceive to be a disastrous response to the coronavirus pandemic in his state, particularly in the past few months as Florida has become one of the nation’s largest hotbeds for COVID infections. Florida currently ranks third among all other states in the U.S. in terms of how many new cases of coronavirus are being reported daily on a per capita basis. The state also has the third-highest rate of COVID deaths in the nation for the past two weeks, with more than 227 Floridians dying per day on average.
Dozens of doctors in Palm Beach County, Florida, gathered on Monday to stage a simulated walkout to draw attention to their hospitals being filled with patients who were not vaccinated against coronavirus.
Around 75 doctors in total took part in the protest, calling on residents in the state to “ignore the nonsense and the absurdities that you’re hearing people say at public meetings,” and to “recognize the value of what a vaccine will do,” reported NBC News correspondent Kerry Sanders.
“It’s incredibly frustrating because we know vaccines are safe and effective,” said JT Snarski, one of the physicians participating in the walkout. “And it’s people who go out and talk against them that really go against physicians and medicine and science.
There’s a simple solution, the doctors said, but one that too few in the state are taking advantage of doing: getting vaccinated to prevent the need for medical help in the first place.
“It is so frustrating. Many of these patients have decided not to get vaccinated, but when they’re hospitalized, they tell us they wish they had,” Jennifer Buczyner, a neurologist, said.
Some experts are hopeful that the recent Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine on Monday will result in those who have been skeptical to change their minds and get vaccinated. However, Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has made several moves to bar vaccine mandates in his state, has implied that he probably wouldn’t try to encourage vaccination any harder if it got approval.
Indeed, as of press time (and a number of hours after the FDA’s announcement), DeSantis’s official Twitter account still hasn’t tweeted about the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, nor has he sent out any encouragements to constituents to get vaccinated as a result of its official approval. Instead, he has touted the opening of more monoclonal antibody treatment centers, a beneficial treatment that can help people avoid hospitalization if they’ve tested positive for coronavirus, but at a rate that’s much lower than getting vaccinated and generally only effective in the first few days of a person identifying their diagnosis.
Critics have suggested that DeSantis may benefit politically, in the form of campaign contributions from corporate donors, from the use of that treatment option rather than the pushing of vaccines. The governor’s PAC has received millions from a hedge fund executive who works for a company which has heavily invested in Regeneron Pharmaceutical Inc., the company that created the monoclonal treatment.
President Joe Biden announced on Wednesday that his administration would utilize civil rights protection powers within the Department of Education in order to challenge governors that are imposing bans on mask mandates in school districts within their states.
Biden said the actions, which will be carried out by Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, were necessary to “take additional steps to protect our children” against the continued spread of coronavirus. He described governors choosing to punish school districts as “setting a dangerous tone” amid a surge of cases and hospitalizations due to COVID-19.
“Some politicians are trying to turn public safety measures — that is, children wearing masks in school — into political disputes for their own political gain. We are not going to sit by as governors try to block and intimidate educators protecting our children,” Biden said in his remarks.
Cardona also described several governors’ actions as being negligent, and said the Department of Education could investigate civil rights violations — specifically Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which says students are entitled to free, appropriate public education, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act — to examine whether the prohibition of masking rules are denying students the right to a safe learning space.
Inquiries from the department could be opened in order to look into alleged violations of students’ rights, particularly those who have been hurt the most by setbacks in education standards since the pandemic started (including students with disabilities, those who are from low-income households, and students of color).
“The department has the authority to investigate any state educational agency whose policies or actions may infringe on the rights of every student to access public education equally,” Cardona said in a statement.
If the Education Department deems a state to have violated students’ rights, penalties could be imposed, including the limiting of federal funding for those states.
Several states have imposed masking guidelines, with three states’ Republican governors, Greg Abbott of Texas, Doug Ducey of Arizona and Ron DeSantis of Florida, imposing the most stringent rules against local school districts seeking to implement masking requirements.
Several school districts in Florida, however, are implementing masking rules for students and staff, despite threats from DeSantis to withhold administrators’ paychecks in retaliation. On Wednesday, three more school districts in the state (including Miami-Dade County, the fourth-largest district in the country) voted to institute mask mandates, bringing the total to five districts that have made rules about the need for facial coverings at school in the state so far.
While the number of districts is small, the proportion of schoolchildren who will be affected by the rules is significant, amounting to 40 percent of kids enrolled in Florida’s public schools. According to reporting from The Washington Post, that number is likely to increase as more districts consider imposing masking rules of their own.
The masking rules come as Florida grapples with incredibly high rates of COVID. The state is one of the hardest-hit in the country with the latest wave of coronavirus infections and is leading the country with the highest rate of hospitalizations. Florida also has the second-highest daily rate for residents testing positive for the virus.
“CDC recommends universal indoor masking by all students (age 2 and older), staff, teachers, and visitors to K-12 schools, regardless of vaccination status,” the agency says on its website.
Polling on the subject shows that most Americans want masking rules to be implemented. According to Axios/Ipsos survey results released this week, 69 percent of voters think that districts should impose measures requiring facial coverings to prevent the spread of coronavirus, while only 30 percent say they oppose such rules.
When the definitive history of the COVID-19 pandemic is written, August 17, 2021, may be remembered as one of the great forks in this terrible road. One path leads to ever-deepening calamity, and the other returns basic common sense to the fight against the virus. We cannot know the outcome today, but I strongly suspect the wrong road will be taken, and another lethal winter will once again put us, and our children, at the mercy of that which did not have to happen.
It was announced yesterday, August 17, that Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas and a vocal opponent of mask mandates, has contracted COVID. He is the 11th governor to do so to date. The announcement brought back vivid memories of the October 2020 day when we found out that Donald Trump had become infected.
As was common during the Trump administration, the general reaction was the paradox of being shocked and thoroughly unsurprised simultaneously. Trump had spent the year essentially daring the virus to catch him, flouting and mocking even the most basic protective measures. In this, he planted the seeds of our current crisis, as millions of his still-devout voters continue to follow his self-destructive lead.
Abbott is cut from the same bolt of hidebound cloth. The Texas governor has gone to war against several municipalities in his state because they want children to wear masks when they return to school. Given the growing body of terrifying evidence that the Delta variant of COVID is going after kids far more than we have seen before, this seems like a reasonable precaution for all to take. Not so, according to Abbott, whose disdain for local government flies in the face of, well, everything conservatives often pretend to stand for.
The arm-flapping hypocrisy does not end there. Abbott is by all reports asymptomatic, which should come as little surprise: He has been vaccinated three times. The vaccines have been highly effective at minimizing the damage of infection so far, but those numbers have recently grown distressingly blurry.
As part of his treatment, Abbott is also getting the Regeneron monoclonal antibody treatment, which is usually only used for patients in dire condition. He is not, but he’s getting it anyway.
With three shots, Abbot is among a favored few; only half the country has been fully vaccinated, and those who have their shots look now to the necessity of booster shots. The COVID Delta variant has caused an explosion of infections, even among inoculated people like Abbott. There were almost 140,000 new infections yesterday alone, a solid portion coming from Abbott’s state.
To recap: The governor of Texas has caught COVID after striving to thwart minimal safety measures for children. His state’s medical infrastructure is trembling on the verge of collapse. Yet he himself has been vaccinated three times, making him rare in the populace and assumedly safer than most. From this bubble, which still did not completely protect him, Abbott has made it his business to keep others in far more peril of infection from minimal precautions like masks.
The icing on the cake is this astonishing video, taken the night before Abbott’s infection announcement. There he was, in a packed room filled with elderly donors, and nary a mask in sight. Was he spraying virus around the room like a one-man superspreader? These were his people, but one wonders if they have all gotten three inoculations like their mask-flouting governor. It’s possible, which in many ways makes the visual all the worse.
How bad is it getting in Abbott’s state? “Texas health officials have requested five mortuary trailers from the federal government in anticipation of a possible spike in deaths brought about by surging coronavirus numbers in the state,” reports The Washington Post. “Mobile and refrigerated mortuary trucks were seen as a grim symbol during earlier waves of the pandemic. Trailers were delivered to cities to keep pace with mounting deaths, and in some places they reportedly remained in place as makeshift morgues months into the pandemic.”
School has begun in a number of places, and many more will open soon. In Texas, they will throw their doors wide to a maskless tide of unvaccinated children who are at greater peril of infection than at any time in the pandemic. The actions of Abbott, and of ideological, conniving pals like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, may come to be seen as nothing short of criminally negligent homicide on a mass scale if the worst does come.
This is COVID. If we have learned anything, it is that the worst often does come, sooner or later, through whatever gaps we negligently provide it. Governors like Abbott and DeSantis are deliberately providing those gaps because they want to inherit Trump’s tarnished (yet lucrative) throne, and need to play to their base in order to do so. It is as ruthlessly cynical as anything that has ever been seen in this land — Let them eat virus! — and threatens to get a lot more people killed.
This is that fork in the road — is a mask-hating governor catching COVID after three shots enough to turn heads and slow down this thundering herd of deadly foolishness? Don’t expect Abbott to get religion after his infection; Trump didn’t, and in fact doubled down hard on his ongoing war on science. That got us this. What will Abbott and his friends get us, but more of the same or worse?
At some point very soon, a greater power than Abbott and DeSantis is going to have to take these matters in hand. Until President Biden takes decisive action, the rest of us will witness the numbers climb every day, as the infection spreads to more and more of our children.
The Florida Board of Education determined on Tuesday that two school districts in the state, in Broward and Alachua Counties, violated the state’s new law banning rules on masking by requiring students to wear facial coverings while at school to prevent the spread of coronavirus.
Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill passed by the state legislature into law earlier this year, and has threatened financial penalties for school administrators — including withholding the salaries of superintendents and school board members — if they violate the statute.
The Florida Board of Education determined that an investigation should move forward, with the possibility of punishing the district’s leaders for noncompliance. If penalized, the two districts would be the first in the state to be punished under the new law.
Broward County interim schools superintendent Vickie Cartwright justified her district’s actions in defying the law banning mask mandates by noting that the county only had five pediatric ICU hospital beds open, amid the spread of the Delta variant of COVID-19.
In response to the possibility that school administrators could be financially disciplined for trying to protect the lives of children, U.S. Department of Education Secretary Miguel Cardona wrote a letter to DeSantis’s office, telling the Florida governor that such punishments would be rectified by the federal government.
“It appears that Florida has prioritized threatening to withhold state funds from school districts that are working to reopen schools safely rather than protecting students and educators and getting school districts the federal pandemic recovery funds to which they are entitled,” Cardona said in his letter, adding that he and the Education Department “stands with these dedicated educators who are working to safely reopen schools and maintain safe in-person instruction.”
In response to the threats to withhold compensation from Florida educators who follow basic public health guidelines, the federal department would pay “the full salaries of educators (including superintendents) and school board members,” Cardona said.
Jennifer watched pandemonium unfold outside the window of her cell at the Manatee County Jail in Florida on the evening of Sunday, April 4. Drones hovered, dozens of police cars sped back and forth down the road. Jail staff moved their personal vehicles to higher ground and led livestock from the jail’s work farm onto trailers.
A wastewater reservoir covering stacks of phosphogypsum — a radioactive byproduct from manufacturing phosphate rock for fertilizer — was leaking at Piney Point, a defunct fertilizer plant nearby. It threatened to inundate nearly eight square miles of land in Manatee County, a sparsely populated area near Tampa Bay. The county jail is in the mandatory evacuation zone for the plant — if the dam holding the water back collapsed, some models predicted up to 10 feet of water on jail property.
While Jennifer — who is using only her first name to protect her identity — and more than 1,000 other incarcerated people waited for answers in lockdown, jail personnel prepared for a looming disaster. “We kept seeing them move the cows,” she said. “But they didn’t move any of us.”
Through interviews and correspondence with six people incarcerated in the Manatee County Jail at the time of the emergency, four of their friends and family members, Manatee County Sheriff’s Department officials, and a review of public records, Southerly pieced together a narrative of what happened inside the jail this April when toxic water threatened to rush inside.
Only 267 men — a quarter of the jail’s population — were eventually evacuated. The rest, including Jennifer and another 133 women, as well as 17 kids being tried as adults, remained on lockdown inside.
From tropical storms to COVID-19, Florida authorities have in some cases failed to keep incarcerated people safe. Nationwide, there is no set standard for how carceral institutions should plan for emergencies, or how they should be incorporated into wider emergency planning efforts. With many jails and prisons constructed away from town centers — as factories and industrial plants often are — environmental concerns incarcerated people face are out of sight — and out of their control.
“We’re all facing the threats of climate change and technological hazards,” said David Pellow, Director of the Global Environmental Justice Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a prominent researcher on environmental justice and incarceration. “We’re just asking for folks who are incarcerated to be included in that disaster planning and preparation.”
The Piney Point plant was named for a waterfront town established in 1914, advertised as the only point between neighboring cities “where the pine woods come squarely up to the waters of the bay.” The plant opened in the 1960s, and newspaper archives from the 1980s and 90s trace the site’s history through multiple owners, bankruptcies, lawsuits, and investigations into illegal dumping. The plant’s emissions damaged trees and crops, sulfuric acid spills gave multiple residents chemical pneumonia, and employees died in preventable workplace accidents. The site discharged waste into the ocean several times throughout the last two decades.
It stopped processing phosphate in 1999. Since the solid phosphogypsum cannot be destroyed or reused, the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, requires it to remain in piles called stacks — there are 25 in Florida — and covered in water. The water surrounding the radon-emitting phosphogypsum is acidic, foul-smelling, and contains heavy metals and known carcinogens, raising concerns for local environmental groups.
One of the reservoirs at Piney Point also contains dredged material from Tampa Bay. Documents from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, or FDEP, from 2019 to 2021 show reports of liner tears, stress fractures and seepage at the reservoirs, which could leak and potentially contaminate groundwater. An inspection in October 2020 found 11 areas of weakness in the liner of one of the reservoirs.
Since the plant closed, it has changed hands several times; currently the owner is HRK Holdings, which declared bankruptcy years ago. On Aug. 5, FDEP filed a lawsuit against the company, alleging “HRK is incapable of operating the facility in compliance with Florida’s environmental laws and the standards, permits, and agreements related to the management of the property.” However, critics say the state also missed warning signs and is also to blame.
On March 25, HRK reported to state environmental regulators that one of the reservoirs at Piney Point was leaking. Contaminated water oozed through a tear in its thick plastic liner, compromising the sediment beneath it. The site manager and crew worked in vain to control the breach, but, within days, environmental engineers reported that the structure had shifted 10 to 12 feet, and its eastern wall had become unstable. If it failed, the stack of phosphogypsum could collapse.
Over a week later, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis declared a state of emergency, and the county issued mandatory evacuation orders for over 300 homes. Alerts hit cell phones and TVs: “Evacuate area NOW. Collapse of Piney Point Stack Imminent.”
At press conferences and on social media, activists and politicians asked questions about the jail. But no representatives from the sheriff’s department briefed the public, though county commissioner Vanessa Baugh said in an email that “the sheriff totally makes all decisions regarding evacuation of the jail.”
Scott Hopes, the acting county administrator, said the medical unit and all personnel in the jail had been relocated to the second floor, more than 10 feet above ground level, and that sandbags had been placed around the first. Citing information from the sheriff’s department, numerouspressoutlets reported that everyone incarcerated in the jail had been moved upstairs.
Randy Warren, public information officer for the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office, later acknowledged that this move never happened for most incarcerated people, adding that those with medical needs were prioritized and moved to the second floor.
Stephanie, who was also incarcerated at the jail during the emergency, said she and others missed medications, had to use a basin to wash, and worried about losing access to food in the event of a flood. Two people with loved ones in the jail said staff repeatedly claimed the media and concerned family members were exaggerating. Jennifer heard the same. “They wouldn’t say very much,” she said of the jail officials. “Just that it’s all a joke.” Warren denied this claim, saying staff worked to keep people calm.
A man named Kurt — who has since been released and asked to use only his nickname for fear of retribution — said that men in his pod were told to pack up their things and take a COVID-19 test. They returned to their pods to wait, though sleep was difficult without their sheets or blankets. Around 4 a.m. on April 5, the men boarded vans.“It was honestly a really scary ride with the speed and darkness,” Kurt wrote in a letter to Southerly in June. “Especially when every time we hit bumps in the road we all [thought] the dam broke and the water was hitting us.”
Warren said that “like all inmate relocations, this was done at the appropriate time and without prior notification to the general public or the inmates involved.”
Joe — who is using a pseudonym to protect his identity — has been held in the Manatee County Jail since 2019. He was on lockdown in the high-security wing in April, and estimates 18 hours passed before a deputy came by, telling them a nearby dam might give out, and “radioactive” water could flood the jail. They remained on lockdown for four days, with a brief break — not enough time to call his wife or shower.
Jail officials said, in the worst case scenario, one to two feet of water would reach jail property, but some models predicted up to six or even 10 feet. By the time reports showed a diminished flood risk, county and jail officials had already completed their evacuation plans. Warren said the reports of danger to the jail were overblown.
However, some incarcerated people said they thought they might drown, and that they never received protective equipment or evacuation instructions for a potential disaster scenario. Although the jail was never inundated with water — by April 6, authorities declared that the risk of a catastrophic breach had passed — experts point to a larger issue within U.S. prisons and jails: No one is considering incarcerated people in disaster planning.
“I would make an argument that we were endangered,” said Joe. “What about the experience that [we] had? Isn’t that worth something?”
Billed as a growth engine for small towns, carceral institutions promised jobs as domestic manufacturing dwindled through the late 20th century. Meanwhile, decommissioned manufacturing facilities languished beside them. In the case of rural jails like the one in Manatee County, proximity to these plants poses an additional risk.
Jails and prisons are often built “far away from population centers” because they’re considered “locally unwanted land uses,” said Pellow. Many people prefer jails and prisons, like landfills, pipelines, and factories, to be “out of sight, out of mind,” he said. Manatee County Jail is built in an industrial area near Port Manatee. It’s surrounded by several other industrial sites, including an airport and a scrapyard.
Environmental crises can also magnify the existing inequities of incarceration. Mass incarceration disproportionately impacts people of color, who are already more likely to die from environmental causes and live near environmental hazards. Data requested by Southerly revealed that, in 2020, 35% of prisoners in the Manatee County Jail were Black, though Black people make up 9.3% of the county. The disparity is even larger in Florida prisons.
A growing jail and prison population makes full evacuations difficult. Florida prisons experience chronic overcrowding, operating at over 100% capacity even during the COVID-19 pandemic. Over time, Florida’s incarceration rates have steadily risen, alongside new and larger prisons and jails. The Manatee County Jail operates close to capacity; some incarcerated people told Southerly they were staying in overcrowded cells.
Manatee County Sheriff Rick Wells told the Bradenton Heraldthat fully evacuating a jail that size “is never going to happen.” Warren said that outside facilities “aren’t necessarily opening the doors to take in other inmates,” so it can be difficult to find somewhere to evacuate to, especially when following COVID-19 protocols. “It’s not like a resort, or a school or something like that,” he told Southerly. “These are people who are there for very obvious reasons.”
An ACLU petition to evacuate the jail filed on April 6 noted that approximately 400 people were being held in the jail due only to their inability to pay bond.
The Manatee County sheriff’s office expressed confidence in the building’s ability to weather a flood. The jail is rated as a safe shelter for up to a Category 4 hurricane, Warren said; it was used by some staff as a shelter during Hurricane Irma in 2017. It has up-to-date emergency plans, he added, but declined to provide more details due to “security risks.”
Manatee County isn’t the only jail in Florida that’s at risk of disaster. In 2014, record-breaking rains rushed into the Escambia County Jail’s basement, lifting gas-powered dryers off the floor and disconnecting gas lines. It sparked an explosion, killing two people and injuring more than 180. Prisoners had complained about the gas odor for days beforehand. The jail was later rebuilt on slightly higher land across the street.
During Hurricane Michael in 2018, the Apalachee Correctional Institution in the Florida Panhandle was not evacuated. The Florida Times Union reported on the massive damage the facility had incurred during the storm and the deterioration of conditions inside in the weeks following: mold, supply shortages, downed phones, contaminated food.
Tracey Washington’s son was incarcerated at the Manatee County Jail in April. She watched the news from her Bradenton home as a subdivision near the jail was evacuated. As the leader of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition’s Manatee chapter, Washington is on the front lines of the fight for justice for currently and formerly incarcerated people. She was struck by the difference between the treatment of people outside and inside the jail.
“I feel like that was very inhumane when you’re evacuating individuals close to their location, and then you’re not evacuating them,” she said. “If something like this occurs again, how are we going to handle it?”
Hospitals are filling up and children are near death across a swath of Red states from Texas to Florida. The governors of those two states are leading a movement.
Republican Governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas have gone all-in on a high-stakes bet, and the example of Donald Trump suggests they may just win it. Win or lose, though, they’re both tenaciously hanging onto their bans on mandated masks in schools.
Their bet is that they’ll get away with letting tens of thousands of their citizens — and thousands of their citizens’ children — die or get “long Covid” and the people of their states will simply forget and move on.
They’re encouraged in that belief by the scientific reality that contagious diseases usually follow a predictable curve of increasing infections until hitting a point where so many people are dead or immune that the disease can no longer expand its range. From there, the disease incidence declines steadily and eventually flattens out to a low level. Add in rapidly expanding vaccination and the curve collapses even faster.
It happened centuries ago with the Bubonic Plague (aka the Black Death) and Smallpox, among other diseases. Before vaccines it happened every year with chickenpox, mumps and measles. It happens now every year with the flu as it did in a big way in 1918. We’ve all seen that curve both in history and in our own lives.
The question is how many adults and children in Florida and Texas will have to die or get “long Covid” before those states hit the “herd immunity” threshold… and whether the good citizens of those states (particularly the Republican voters) will tolerate that level of disability and death just to satisfy the tough-guy egos of their respective governors.
After all, Trump presided over what was arguably the worst period of unnecessary mass deaths and disability in the history of America… and DeSantis and Abbott voters still love him.
Multiple scientific analyses of Trump’s response to the pandemic, the most credible highlighted by Dr. Deborah Birx after she left the White House, show that at least 400,000 Americans would not have died if Trump had simply put into place a nationwide mask and social-distancing mandate like most other countries did.
But Trump, afraid that any concessions to public health would soften the economy and therefore his re-election chances, chose instead to encourage people to ignore masks and other protective measures and just go shopping and get back to work.
That part of Trump’s bet didn’t quite work out as planned: he lost the election. But his longer-term bet, that most Americans would soon forget and not blame him for all those unnecessary deaths, has paid off.
Instead of being saddled with the Stalin-like title of a mass murderer of his own people (Stalin used famine instead of disease), Trump is back to holding rallies and basking in the warm glow of his cult’s adoration… while continuing to spread disease among his followers!
DeSantis and Abbott think they can pull off the same trick, and they may well be right. Killing large numbers of Americans rarely sticks to Republicans.
George W. Bush made a similar bet back in 2001 after 9/11, as Spencer Ackerman documents in detail in his new book Reign of Terror. Bush could have simply taken the Taliban up on their offer to arrest Bin Laden and turn him over for prosecution, but instead he began bombing the second-poorest country in the world, where the average income was around $700 a year.
The following year he doubled down on his bet, repeating LBJ’s trick of lying us into an unnecessary war, this one with Iraq, leading to over a million dead and displaced Iraqis and thousands of dead Americans.
LBJ isn’t remembered so well, in large part because the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC brings into shocking relief the level of death and sacrifice his lies caused. It’s safe to bet that Republicans will never allow a memorial of that type for veterans of the Afghanistan or Iraq wars… or to the memory of the half-million-plus Americans who died of Covid on Trump’s watch.
Plus, Democratic President Joe Biden has taken on the task of cleaning up the messes from Bush’s illegal wars and Trump’s democide, and he doesn’t seem particularly inclined to rub either in Republicans’ faces.
So, how will this play out for DeSantis and Abbott? Both are betting that deaths and “long Covid” disease will plateau soon and then begin to drop and they can then do a victory lap. But they may be waiting quite a while, given the low vaccination rates in their states and the particularly ugly virality and potency of this new variant.
And Delta, unlike the original Covid that was often called the “Boomer Remover,” is landing children in hospitals by the hundreds in both states. Last month, in an early foretaste of the brute force of this variant, the nation was shocked when 5-year-old Wyatt Gibson — an otherwise normal, healthy child with no preexisting conditions — died in his mother’s arms at a children’s hospital in Georgia.
And children are also getting long Covid, which may disable them for life. As theAgence France-Presse news service reports about a normal, American healthy 10-year-old in Philadelphia who got long Covid, “His symptoms were debilitating: pain in his legs so bad he couldn’t walk anywhere and gastrointestinal distress and nausea so severe he had to lie in bed. Unable to navigate stairs, he crawled instead.”
And the damage wasn’t limited to this child’s body:
“At school, basic math equations and completing homework assignments became enormously challenging for the usually grade-A student. Kasturirangan describes it as a ‘kind of confusion, because he couldn’t grasp basic things that he’d normally find so easy to deal with.’”
“Almost half of children who contract Covid-19 may have lasting symptoms, which should factor into decisions on reopening schools… Evidence from the first study of long covid in children suggests that more than half of children aged between 6 and 16 years old who contract the virus have at least one symptom lasting more than 120 days, with 42.6 percent impaired by these symptoms during daily activities.”
The authors add that such symptoms include long-lasting “fatigue, muscle and joint pain, headache, insomnia, respiratory problems and heart problems” and that “there may be up to 100 other symptoms, including gastrointestinal problems, nausea, dizziness, seizures, hallucinations and testicular pain.”
“What can protect those children, however, is universal in-school masking for students and staff. It’s been studied by Duke University researchers who tracked COVID-19 transmission in North Carolina K-12 schools across 100 school districts, 14 charter schools, 160,549 school staffers, and more than 864,515 students attending in-school instruction.
“‘We have learned a few things for certain,’ wrote the researchers, Dr. Kanecia Zimmerman, associate professor of pediatrics at the Duke University School of Medicine, and Dr. Danny Benjamin, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Duke Health. ‘Although vaccination is the best way to prevent COVID-19, universal masking is a close second, and with masking in place, in-school learning is safe and more effective than remote instruction, regardless of community rates of infection.’”
With school mask mandates banned by DeSantis and Abbott, however, children’s hospitals in Florida and Texas are now staggered by Covid; the headlines tell the story.
“COVID-19 Cases Among Kids Overwhelming Florida Hospitals” blares The NY Post; “Florida Sets COVID Hospitalization Records Again, Including Highest in Nation for Children” says The Daytona Beach News-Journal.
In Texas, the Dallas NBC TV affiliateKXAS (Channel 5) headlined their story this week: “‘Full-on Surge’: Tarrant County Leaders Worry About Children’s Health, Hospital Capacity.” CNN delivers the grim news with this headline: “Baby Girl with Covid-19 Airlifted 150 Miles Because of Houston Hospital Bed Shortage.”
Will DeSantis and Abbott be able to withstand this kind of news as their infection rates, particularly among children as school resumes, continue to climb?
How many deaths and how much illness will Florida and Texas Republicans accept in the name of “owning the libs” by refusing to allow schools to mandate masks?
Nobody knows the answers to these questions right now, but betting that a Republican can’t get away with something awful close to murder is always a bad bet.
Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’s office on Monday suggested that he may take punitive action against local school district officials if they decide to move forward on requiring masks in their schools for the upcoming academic year.
DeSantis, however, issued an executive order last month, forbidding schools from issuing mandates on masking. His order claimed that a set of guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on masking in schools “lacks” scientific backing, despite studies that demonstrate just the opposite, which is that masking has helped to contain the spread of COVID-19.
The penalties for schools defying DeSantis’s order from last month would be monetary. The state board of education, under his orders, “could move to withhold the salary of the district superintendent or school board members,” a statement from the governor’s office said.
DeSantis’s administration has attempted to frame the issue as one concerning the rights of parents.
“Education funding is for the students. The kids didn’t make the decision to encroach upon parents’ rights,” a Twitter post from DeSantis spokeswoman Christina Pushaw read. “So any financial penalties for breaking the rule would be targeted to those officials who made that decision.”
Yet polling from within the state appears to show that most Floridians actually support a return to masking rules for students and school administrators. According to a FloridaPolitics.com poll published last week, 62 percent of residents think masks should be required inside school buildings, while less than 32 percent said they should not be mandated.
The order from DeSantis last month attempting to block school districts from issuing rules on masking may also be illegal — a violation of parents’ rights to have their children attend schools that are safe. A group of parents in Florida, some with children who have pre-existing health conditions that may make them more vulnerable to coronavirus, are suing the governor over his executive order because they believe it goes against a provision in the state Constitution that requires schools to provide a safe place for students to be.
“The Executive Order impairs the safe operation of schools. Students will become sick and potentially die as a result of the failure to follow the mandatory masking requirements” issued by the CDC, the lawsuit from those parents asserts.
Concerns about coronavirus in schools abound, particularly due to the additional dangers that the Delta variant poses to children, as Truthout senior editor and lead columnist William Rivers Pitt noted in a column earlier this week.
“Science has yet to comprehensively answer why Delta appears to affect young people more than the other strains have, but the steadily filling hospital beds stand as testament to the truth of it,” Pitt wrote on Monday.
“We reopened the country too much and too soon,” Pitt added. “Now we wait and see how much the jarring whiplash of that error in judgment will cost us.”
If Florida were a country, U.S. officials might consider enacting a travel ban due to the scale of the coronavirus outbreak in the state, an expert on infectious diseases said on Sunday.
Speaking to CNN over the weekend, Jonathan Reiner, a professor at the George Washington School of Medicine and Health Sciences, explained that there were “really only two places on the planet where” viral loads of COVID were “higher”: the nation of Botswana and the state of Louisiana.
“It’s so high in Florida that I think if Florida were another country, we would have to consider banning travel from Florida to the United States,” Reiner said.
“People are dying in Florida,” Reiner added. “It’s going to get much worse.”
Several courts are hearing cases that seek to challenge DeSantis’ authority to block local mandates. A federal judge recently said that DeSantis cannot stop cruise lines from denying patrons from boarding ships if they cannot supply proof of vaccination. Several parents of schoolchildren filed a lawsuit last week arguing that the ban on mask rules in school districts violates a provision in the state constitution which requires public officials to ensure safety in places of learning.
A number of voices from within Florida have lashed out at DeSantis for his approach to the continuing crisis, including newspaper editorial boards, which see his actions as careerist.
“To save lives, [DeSantis] must start acting like Florida’s governor and less like he’s auditioning for Turning Point USA or Texas Gov. Greg Abbott or whatever Fox News host comes calling,” the editorial board for The Orlando Sentinel said in July.
Over the past 14 days, the number of new daily cases of coronavirus in Florida has increased by 84 percent, averaging more than 19,000 in a seven-day period. The number of hospitalizations have also increased by 111 percent during that time, with the number of deaths per day as a result of the virus up by 124 percent.
Local government officials in Florida are issuing new rules in their areas that will require some residents to mask up in certain indoor locations and county workers to get vaccinated, a move that could challenge a law signed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis earlier this year.
Masks or facial coverings are now required in all indoor buildings and facilities managed by Miami-Dade County. Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said the decision was based on a recent surge of new cases and hospitalizations in the county.
“We have all come too far. We have all sacrificed too much in this past almost year and a half. We cannot turn back now,” Levine Cava said.
Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings also announced that nonunion county employees would be required to get their first COVID-19 vaccine shots by the end of August, and second shots would be required by the end of September. Similar rules were being negotiated for unionized workers in the county.
Orange County is home to Disney World, which also announced masks would be required for patrons in the indoor parts of its parks, including inside buses, the monorail and other modes of transport, no matter what a person’s vaccine status is.
In Broward County, the school board announced it would also impose mask requirements inside all of the schools for pupils, teachers, staff, and visitors who step inside those buildings for the coming academic year.
“I really wanted to start this school year as normal as possible. And a few weeks ago, I thought that we were in a position to go back to school without wearing masks and giving parents a choice,” said school board member Lori Alhadeff. “But now with COVID soaring, and the Delta variant, a lot has changed.”
The decisions by these county leaders to impose new requirements come as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) made new recommendations for people in some of the nation’s hotspots. Regardless of whether a person is vaccinated or not, the CDC said, people should wear masks indoors if they’re residing in one of these hotspots.
The rules in Florida, however, may be challenged by DeSantis, who has expressed an anti-scientific viewpoint when it comes to the management of COVID-19 in his state. Florida Republican lawmakers passed a bill, which DeSantis signed in May, granting the governor the ability to cancel any local orders related to the pandemic.
DeSantis’s press secretary Christina Pushaw said that at least one of the new mandates would “be addressed” by the governor soon. DeSantis himself was not in the state on Wednesday, instead appearing at a conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) conference in Utah, where he joked about the new CDC guidelines to a mostly maskless audience.
“Did you not get the CDC’s memo?” the Florida governor said at the conference, referring to the new recommendations released this week. “I don’t see you guys complying.”
DeSantis’s humor will likely be viewed as being in bad taste by many, given how things are worsening in his home state more than 1,800 miles away. More than 38,000 new cases of COVID-19 were reported in Florida on Tuesday alone, the day before he spoke at the ALEC conference, clocking in at the highest single-day count since the start of the pandemic in March 2020. In the past week, more than 350 Floridians died as a result of contracting coronavirus.
The state of Floridanow accounts for one in five new coronavirus infections in the United States, making it the nation’s most alarming hot spot as the highly transmissible Delta strain rips through undervaccinated communities and drives a surge in hospitalizations.
According tonew datafrom the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Florida has recorded 73,181 new Covid-19 cases over the past week, the most in the country. Florida also logged the most coronavirus deaths of any U.S. state in the last seven days — 319 — and hospitalizations are spiking, prompting dire warnings from physicians and calls for public safety measures to stop the spread.
But Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican and likely 2024 presidential candidate, has recently taken to mocking such measures; earlier this month, the governor’s teamlauncheda new merchandise line that includes a koozie with the quote, “How the hell am I going to be able to drink a beer with a mask on?”
Other items take aim at Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a frequent target of right-wing ire. “Don’t Fauci My Florida,” declares a shirt selling for $21 on a DeSantis campaign website.
While DeSantis haspublicly stressedthe importance of vaccination in recent days, Florida physicians have attributed the surge in infections, hospitalizations, and deaths in the state to the governor’srush to end public health restrictions.
“While hospitals in our state were filling up, DeSantis was shouting about ‘Freedom over Faucism,’”saidBernard Ashby, a Miami-based cardiologist and head of the of the Florida chapter of the Committee to Protect Health Care. “If DeSantis were as concerned about stopping Covid-19 spread as he was about coming up with these clever jabs about Dr. Fauci, we might not be in this position.”
As theWall StreetJournalreportedSunday, epidemiologists argue that “various factors” are behind the Florida crisis, including: “large numbers of unvaccinated people, a relaxation of preventive measures like mask-wearing and social distancing, the spread of the highly contagious Delta variant of the coronavirus, and the congregation of people indoors during hot summer months.”
Chad Neilsen, director of accreditation and infection prevention at the University of Florida Health Jacksonville, told theJournalthat hospitalizations are surging at a rate “we have not seen before ever.” Data collected by Florida epidemiologists shows that recent hospital patients have been skewing younger, with more than half under the age of 60.
“It really has been unbelievable,” said Neilsen.
In a scathingeditoriallast week, theOrlando Sentinelaccused DeSantis of prioritizing his presidential aspirations over Florida’s pandemic response.
“Florida was all over the news this past weekend with one of the nation’s biggest spikes in Covid cases and hospitalizations,” the editorial reads. “And where was Gov. Ron DeSantis as this health crisis resurged? Visiting hospitals? Consulting with physicians and public health experts? Huddling with his staff to brainstorm ways of persuading more Floridians to take the vaccine that would nip this pandemic in the bud?”
“Nope. Florida’s governor was in Texas, 1,000 miles from Tallahassee, burnishing his 2024 presidential ambitions with a visit to the southern border,” the article continues. “The governor was back in Florida on Sunday but, once again, not to focus on the Covid health crisis but this time to make fun of Anthony Fauci in a speech before a crowd of young conservatives in Tampa… And every few days, nearly as many people are dying from Covid as died in the recent collapse of a condominium in South Florida.”
Florida’s coronavirus surge comes in the context of anationwide jump in infectionsthat has federal officials worried about another devastating wave as vaccination rates slow and governments relax — and, in the case ofFloridaand other Republican-led states,aim to actively prohibit — public health requirements such as mask-wearing indoors.
TheNew York Timesreported over the weekend that “hospitalizations have increased in 45 states, Washington D.C., and Puerto Rico over the past two weeks.”
“The only states where they have gone down are Maryland, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont,” theTimesnoted. “Florida, Missouri, and Texas account for about 34% of all new cases nationwide. Greene County insouthwestern Missourireported259 Covid-19 hospitalizations on Tuesday, up from a previous high of 237 on December 1. By Wednesday, that number was 265.”
In an appearance onCNNSunday morning, Fauciwarnedthat the U.S. is “going in the wrong direction.”
“This is an issue predominantly among the unvaccinated,” said Fauci, “which is the reason why we’re out there practically pleading with the unvaccinated people to go out and get vaccinated.”
Hospitals throughout the state of Florida are seeing increases in COVID-19 numbers, so much so that some have reverted to implementing policies that limit visitors in order to curtail the possibility of spreading the virus.
Jackson Health System, a public hospital system in Miami-Dade County, which includes three separate hospitals, has seen the number of patients admitted for overnight care due to coronavirus infections increase from 66 on July 6 to 139 as of July 19, the Herald noted. Baptist Health South Florida’s system of 10 hospitals has seen the number of patients admitted for coronavirus increase nearly 300 percent since the end of June. And Memorial Healthcare System, which has six hospitals, says it’s treating 225 patients for COVID-19, compared to just 92 patients about a month ago.
The state as a whole is experiencing huge increases in coronavirus case numbers. Florida’s seven-day average of new cases being reported is currently at 6,493 cases per day — an increase of 454 percent compared to just four weeks ago, when the rate was at 1,171 per day on June 20.
What’s driving up these numbers? Some doctors at these hospitals have suggested the problem is twofold: low vaccination rates in the state, and young people wrongly believing they’re protected from the virus.
“The overwhelming majority [of patients] are unvaccinated individuals, and they do appear to be younger than before,” said Marc Napp, chief medical officer for Memorial Healthcare.
The situation is causing some hospitals to change their policies back somewhat to what they were previously, during the height of the pandemic. With limited exceptions, Jackson Health, for instance, will be suspending all visitations for its inpatient units starting on Wednesday.
Central Florida is also seeing increases in coronavirus cases at its hospitals. Orange County reported almost 2,000 new cases of the virus this past weekend alone, including five deaths. Orlando Regional Medical Center is at 97 percent capacity in its ICU, and Advent Health Orlando’s ICU is at 93 percent capacity as well.
For comparison, the national rate for ICU capacity is currently around 68 percent.
The board chastised DeSantis for his travels outside the state, including recently to Texas, where it appeared he was promoting his future in politics.
“At the moment, it’s as if DeSantis has washed his hands of the matter and moved on to elections, borders, critical race theory, mocking [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony] Fauci or whatever else will get him a headline,” the board added. “And every few days, nearly as many people are dying from COVID as died in the recent collapse of a condominium in South Florida.”
DeSantis’s return to his home state, and the rise in coronavirus numbers in Florida overall, didn’t seem to lessen his rhetoric against Fauci. On Sunday, he gave a speech to young conservatives where he spent considerable time mocking the infectious diseases expert over his opening pitch at a Major League Baseball game last year.
“To save lives, [DeSantis] must start acting like Florida’s governor and less like he’s auditioning for Turning Point USA or Texas Gov. Greg Abbott or whatever Fox News host comes calling,” the board added.
One of the coolest stories I’ve ever heard is about a bank building that was constructed back in the Carter administration. Snuggle up and I’ll tell it as I heard it, but be advised: All of this is really about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and the political party he seeks someday to lead, but only if a famously truculent occasional resident (and recently defeated president) decides to spit the bit. Trust me; it all comes around in the end.
In 1977, the skyline of New York City was graced with the arrival of a new and refreshingly unique building. Designed by architects Hugh Stubbins, Emery Roth & Sons and structural engineer William LeMessurier, the Citigroup Center — formerly the Citicorp Center, and known to most as the “Citibank Building” — stands out from the crowd in that packed cityscape.
Gleaming white, with its unique roof peaked at a 45-degree angle, the Citibank building was constructed on huge stilts that make up the bottom nine floors of the structure; the builders chose stilts to accommodate the St. Peter’s Lutheran Church, which occupied a corner of the building’s footprint on the ground level.
“Nine-story stilts suspend the building over St. Peter’s church. But rather than putting the stilts in the corners, they had to be located at the midpoint of each side to avoid the church,” reportedSlate in 2014. “Having stilts in the middle of each side made the building less stable, so LeMessurier designed a chevron bracing structure — rows of eight-story V’s that served as the building’s skeleton. The chevron bracing structure made the building exceptionally light for a skyscraper, so it would sway in the wind. LeMessurier added a tuned mass damper, a 400-ton device that keeps the building stable.”
The Citibank Building was a true feather in the caps of its designers and constructors, until a year later, when a junior staffer of LeMessurier received a telephone call from an undergraduate architecture student Diane Hartley. Hartley told the staffer that, if her calculations were correct, the Citibank Building was unstable, especially in what are called “cornering winds” — winds that strike the corners of the structure rather than face on. In a high enough wind, the building would collapse.
LeMessurier investigated, and sure enough, Hartley was right: The building was vulnerable to collapse in high wind, and hurricane season was coming. What followed was one of the quietest and most effective all-hands-on-deck emergency operations in the history of engineering, beginning with the most important moment: LeMessurier chose to act, and not duck his responsibilities.
The building had to be reinforced, but in a way that did not cause panic for the thousands of people who lived and worked in the radius of where the 59-story, 915-foot structure might fall. If it went down sideways, the ensuing catastrophe would be unspeakable.
“LeMessurier and his team worked with Citicorp to coordinate emergency repairs,” reportedSlate. “With the help of the NYPD, they worked out an evacuation plan spanning a 10-block radius. They had 2,500 Red Cross volunteers on standby, and three different weather services employed 24/7 to keep an eye on potential windstorms. They welded throughout the night and quit at daybreak, just as the building occupants returned to work. But all of this happened in secret, even as Hurricane Ella was racing up the eastern seaboard.”
If you’ve never heard this story before, there’s a reason: The day after the press got a whiff of the operation, workers at every major New York City newspaper went on strike. By the time they resumed work, the crisis had been averted, and the Citigroup Center now stands as one of the strongest and most structurally sound buildings on Earth.
Super-cool, right? Tell that to DeSantis.
“Gov. Ron DeSantis said Wednesday that condominiums in Florida are ‘kind of a dime a dozen, particularly in southern Florida,’” reportsThe Tampa Bay Times, “but he would not commit to any state action to address concerns about the aging buildings, suggesting that Champlain Towers South ‘had problems from the start.’ Speaking after a briefing on Tropical Storm Elsa at the state Emergency Operations Center in Tallahassee, the governor would not say if he supports calls to require that aging buildings throughout the state be re-certified to assure residents of their structural integrity in the wake of the deadly collapse of the 136-unit high rise in Surfside.”
Workers at the ruins of the collapsed Champlain Towers South in Surfside, Florida, have officially abandoned hope of finding anyone alive in the mass of rubble. It is now a recovery mission. The confirmed death toll stands at 54, with 86 people still unaccounted for. Some days ago, one of the rescue workers was required to identify his young daughter when her body was found by a coworker in the wreckage.
A dime a dozen, Governor DeSantis? There are dozens of buildings just like Champlain Towers in and around the Miami-Dade region, and those that were built 40 years ago — as Champlain Towers was — went up in an era when building codes and safety measures took a deep back seat to speedy construction and maximized profit. How about a dime for every one of the dead, now and to come?
Here is your Republican Party, friends and neighbors, in the guise of one who would lead it. A glaring problem with a tangible fix is elbowed aside in favor of laws banning critical race theory and blocking people of color from the voting booth. The party is so consumed with keeping its base riled by way of culture war fights that they have — for a very long time now — utterly forgotten how to govern.
Maybe they never knew. Maybe they just don’t care, until another 150 people get killed when a second shabbily constructed building — sitting on sand in a state that will likely be underwater by the time my daughter retires, if not well before — comes crashing down to earth, then a third and a fourth. There will be more pious words, and the dodge will begin anew.
The rescue of the Citibank Building should be a lesson for Florida and its “What, me worry?” governor. Flawed buildings can be fixed and lives can be saved, but only if authorities choose to act.
But hey, what am I talking about, right? Citibank happened back when this country actually did stuff to help itself. Here in the U.S., we’re not really down with that anymore. Instead, we wait for the other shoe — or building — to drop, so our “leaders” can offer thoughts and prayers while preening for the cameras with the dust of disaster dulling the polish on their shoes.
A 2018 report found evidence of major damage in the high-rise South Florida building that partially collapsed last week.
The report raised concerns about “cracking and spalling” in the parking garage of Champlain Towers South in Surfside. The report also raised concerns about structural damage to the concrete slab beneath the pool deck.
Some residents have told NBC News they weren’t told about the findings of the report. It’s not yet clear what the exact cause of the partial pancake collapse of the building on 24 June was.
As search efforts continue, the death toll has been rising. 12 people have been found dead so far, with 149 still missing.
Possible causes
After the report came out in October 2018, members of the Champlain Towers South condo association did not start the assessment process needed to pay for repairs until this year.
The association approved an assessment in April to complete the repairs, set to cost condo owners $15m.
A letter from the condo association’s board president in the same month warned some of the damage observed in the 2018 report had “gotten significantly worse“.
According to research from Florida International University, the building was sinking at a rate of two millimetres per year in the nineties. The researcher said it could have accelerated or slowed down since.
Climate change vulnerability
Rising sea levels are likely to have a large impact on the low-lying land in South Florida. Experts have said the advance of sea levels could threaten buildings in the area, particularly older ones.
According to University of Miami geographer Harold Wanless, South Florida could be hit by up to a foot more sea level per decade in the latter half of the 21st century.
He said:
It’s going to be an enormous to impossible job everywhere to deal with that. The sea level rise is accelerating and will do so more dramatically than most people anticipate.
Every sandy barrier island, every low-lying coast, from Miami to Mumbai, will become inundated and difficult to maintain functional infrastructure. You can put valves in sewers and put in sea walls but the problem is the water will keep coming up through the limestone. You’re not going to stop this.
The victims
Rescuers are continuing to search the ruins of the building for the 150 missing residents. Concerns have been raised about the safety of emergency workers.
No survivors have been pulled from the rubble since 24 June.
As of 26 June, nine Argentinians and six Paraguayans were among the missing. The Miami Herald reported more of the victims were from Colombia, Venezuela, and Uruguay.
Andy Alvarez, Miami-Dade Fire Rescue’s deputy incident commander, is overseeing the rescue efforts. He said:
This is a frantic search to continue to see that hope, that miracle, to see who we can bring out of this building alive.
He added:
You’ve got to have hope and you’ve got to have faith. Every single task force from the state of Florida is here.
Washington – Concerning the Finders cult — the elusive Washington, D.C.-based outfit whose antics and ties we began examining in Part 1 of this series — one set of documents in particular held the most explosive allegations made against the group and against the CIA for allegedly covering the story up. Despite their contents, almost no corporate press ever quoted from these documents or addressed the concerns they raise. This article will attempt to remedy that deficit of coverage by fully exploring what the documents have to say.
I previously described the 1987 arrest of two well-dressed men in Tallahassee, Florida, on charges of child abuse relating to six children found neglected, dirty, and hungry in their care.
Public universities in Florida will be required to survey both faculty and students on their political beliefs and viewpoints, with the institutions at risk of losing their funding if the responses are not satisfactory to the state’s Republican-led legislature.
The unprecedented project, which was tucked into a law signed Tuesday by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, is part of a long-running,nationwide right-wing push to promote “intellectual diversity” on campuses — though worries over a lack of details on the survey’s privacy protections, and questions over what the results may ultimately be used for, hover over the venture.
Based on the bill’s language, survey responses will not necessarily be anonymous — sparking worries among many professors and other university staff that they may be targeted, held back in their careers or even fired for their beliefs.
According to the bill’s sponsor, state Sen. Ray Rodrigues, faculty will not be promoted or fired based on their responses, but, asThe Tampa Bay Times reportedTuesday, the bill itself does not back up those claims.
The only details on the survey come via a passage over its purpose, to discover “the extent to which competing ideas and perspectives are presented” at public universities, and whether students “feel free to express beliefs and viewpoints on campus and in the classroom.”
“It used to be thought that a university campus was a place where you’d be exposed to a lot of different ideas,” DeSantis said at a press conference following the bill signing. “Unfortunately, now the norm is, these are more intellectually repressive environments. You have orthodoxies that are promoted, and other viewpoints are shunned or even suppressed.”
Republicans havelong heldthat universities promote left-wing ideologies and discriminate against conservative students and staff.
Though the bill does not specify what the survey results will be used for, both DeSantis and Rodrigues suggested that the state could institute budget cuts if university students and staff do not respond in a satisfactory manner.
“That’s not worth tax dollars and that’s not something that we’re going to be supporting moving forward,” DeSantis said.
When pressed by reporters, the governor did not offer any specific examples of repression and discrimination faced by conservative students, simply saying that he knows “a lot of parents” whoworry about their children being “indoctrinated”on campus.
Florida Senate President Wilton Simpson was more pointed in his criticism Tuesday at a meeting of the state university system’s Board of Governors, calling the institutions “socialism factories” — again without much detail on what makes the schools so left-wing.
“We always hear about the liberal parts of the university system, and we don’t hear so much of that from the college system,” he said, according to The Tampa Bay Times.
In addition to the survey, the bill also prevents officials from limiting campus speech that “may be uncomfortable, disagreeable or offensive” — a measure that, as Democrats in the state Legislature pointed out, will also make it easier for groups like the KKK or the Proud Boys to hold events on campus.
In a conversationwith the Miami Heraldthis April, Barney Bishop, one of the top lobbyists pushing the bill in Florida’s state legislature over the past year, shone a light on the justifications behind such measures — which he said were less about “intellectual diversity” and more concerned with maintaining the country’s conservative Christian identity in the face of younger, more diverse generations that share a dimmer view of religious right-wing orthodoxy.
Bishop also told the paper he “certainly hopes” the effort will expand into the K-12 system over time.
“I think the problem isn’t just in higher ed. The truth of the matter is that kids are being indoctrinated from an early age,” he said.
“I think that those of us who have diverse thinking and look at both sides of the issue, see that the way the cards are stacked in the education system, is toward the left and toward the liberal ideology and also secularism — and those were not the values that our country was founded on. Those are the values that we need to get our country back to.”
Republican-led legislatures in Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Texas, and other states are passing laws that make it harder to vote. Many of these bills, which have been drafted with help from an offshoot of the conservative Heritage Foundation, will have a disproportionate impact on voters of color and are being challenged in court.
While judges could strike down some provisions for violating a state constitution or discriminating against voters with disabilities, the appellate courts that will make the final decision include mostly Republican appointees.
The GOP is defending the legislation as a response to voter fraud, though there is no evidence of widespread fraud. Jessica Anderson of Heritage Action, which helped with the drafting, said the bills would help “right the wrongs of November.” Heritage has long advocated voting restrictions, such as voter ID laws; as founder Paul Weyrich said in 1980, “Our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” The group has pledged to spend millions defending the new laws in court.
Voter suppression laws have faced difficulty passing the scrutiny of courts in recent years. For example, North Carolina’s 2013 voting law, which included a strict voter ID mandate, cuts to early voting, and the end of Election Day registration, was struck down by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Virginia in 2016. The court found that legislators had targeted Black voters “with almost surgical precision.”
North Carolina went on to pass another voter ID law that was also blocked by a federal judge in late 2019. The 4th Circuit overturned that decision, but in February 2020 the state Court of Appeals blocked the law after finding it likely violated the state constitution by disenfranchising Black voters. The case went to trial last month. The North Carolina Supreme Court, which has the final say on state law, has a 4-3 Democratic majority, but Republicans could take control after next year’s election.
In Texas, Florida, and Georgia, the state supreme courts are composed entirely of Republican justices. Most of them are affiliated with the conservative Federalist Society, which helped both former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis choose appointees.
Trump appointed more than a quarter of active federal judges, and last year his appointees shot down efforts to ease voting rules during the pandemic. The U.S. Supreme Court, which now has a 6-3 majority of Republican appointees including three put there by Trump, is unlikely to rule that the new Southern voter suppression laws discriminate against voters of color. In the run-up to last year’s election, the high court ruled against voters several times, including a ruling in favor of Alabama officials who were seeking to bar local election boards from offering curbside voting during the COVID-19 pandemic.
These judges are unlikely to rule that the new voter suppression bills are racially discriminatory, but some courts could strike them down for violating the state constitution or the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
Citing the ADA in Georgia
Georgia’s new voting law incorporated several recommendations from Heritage, including strict limits on ballot drop boxes and mail-in ballot request forms, as well as bans on counties raising money from nonprofits for election administration. It also allows state officials to overturn decisions by local elections officials.
Civil rights groups immediately filed lawsuits challenging the new rules. A federal lawsuit from several voting rights groups argues the law will have a greater impact on voters of color, who face much longer wait times.
Any ruling to strike down the law would be reviewed by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which hears cases from Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. Republicans have radically reshaped the court in recent years, and Trump’s appointees included lawyers who had defended voter suppression. For example, Judge Andrew Brasher in his previous role as Alabama’s solicitor general had filed a brief defending a Florida law that had been struck down as an unconstitutional “poll tax.” The court agreed and restored the restrictive Florida law.
Though federal courts probably won’t strike down the new Georgia voter suppression bill as racially discriminatory, the lawsuits argue that some provisions — including the ban on giving food and water to voters waiting in line — violate the ADA. The 11th Circuit previously issued groundbreaking rulings that broadly interpreted the ADA. But last year, in addition to upholding Alabama’s restrictions on curbside voting, the court ruled that a grocery store’s website wasn’t subject to the ADA.
The law could eventually face challenges in state court as well, because the Georgia Constitution includes strict limits on the legislature’s power. The state Supreme Court has had a conservative majority since the legislature packed the court in 2016. Six of the seven justices are Republican appointees.
Multiple Challenges in Florida
Gov. DeSantis signed a bill on May 3 that also bans giving food and water to waiting voters and sharply limits drop boxes for mail-in ballots. After last year’s election, DeSantis praised election administration in his state and held it up as a model. But the bill he signed makes big changes and was opposed by local election administrators.
The new law makes it nearly impossible for voter registration groups to help voters return their ballots, and it requires those groups to recite a misleading “warning” to people they help register to vote. Now election boards must post an employee to constantly monitor drop boxes, which can be open only during early voting hours.
Civil rights groups immediately filed multiple challenges against the law in federal court. They argued, among other things, that it violates the ADA by making voting inaccessible to many voters with limited mobility, who are more likely to use drop boxes that are “placed outdoors and are easily accessible.” One lawsuit argues the penalties for giving voters food and water “exposes family members, caregivers, and volunteers to potential criminal liability.”
Another federal lawsuit says the bill “purports to solve problems that do not exist” and “caters to a dangerous lie about the 2020 election that threatens our most basic democratic values.” It argues the bill was intended to keep senior citizens, young people, and voters of color from casting their ballots.
Like Georgia’s, Florida’s new voter suppression law would likely be reviewed by the conservative 11th Circuit. And any state case would be headed for the Florida Supreme Court, which is one of the most conservative courts in the country. All of the justices are Republican appointees.
A Pledge to Sue in Texas
The Texas House passed a bill on May 7 that bans election officials from sending out unsolicited mail-in ballot request forms, empowers partisan poll watchers, and creates criminal penalties for election officials who violate limits on helping voters. A similar measure had already passed the Senate and the bill is now being finalized in conference.
Republicans removed some of the bill’s more onerous restrictions last week, as well as controversial “purity of the ballot box” language that was added to the state constitution when white supremacist politicians established Jim Crow.
Democrats said they would sue over the law in federal court, but the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which hears cases from Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, is arguably the most conservative appellate court in the country. Trump’s appointees included Judge Kyle Duncan, who signed a brief defending the 2013 North Carolina voter suppression bill.
The 5th Circuit struck down a Texas voter ID law as violating the Voting Rights Act in 2016. But the court upheld a subsequent voter ID bill two years later. The court has also issued several rulings to throw out ADA lawsuits in recent years.
If the new law is challenged under the state constitution, the case would be tried in the state capital of Austin. Most of the judges there are Democrats, but the legislature is considering a bill that would take the decision out of the hands of Austin’s appellate judges. The bill would create a new appellate court, elected in statewide partisan races, to review rulings in cases challenging state laws.
In 2020, the all-GOP Texas Supreme Court sided with state officials seeking to block a county official from sending mail-in ballot request forms to all registered voters.
Arkansas Sued in State Court
Unlike in the other states, Arkansas’ legislature didn’t pass a single bill with multiple restrictions on voting rights. But it did pass a series of bills that included many of the same Heritage Foundation suggestions. Legislators also toughened Arkansas’ voter ID law and gave county commissioners authority over polling places. Holly Dixon of the state ACLU said this legislative session saw “the most dangerous assault on the right to vote since the Jim Crow era.”
The state League of Women Voters and Arkansas United, an immigrant advocacy group, challenged the bills in state court. The groups argue that the new voting restrictions violate the rights to equal protection, a “free and equal election,” and free speech guaranteed by the Arkansas Constitution.
Lawmakers defended the bills as a response to fraud. But the lawsuit argues that “if there is a threat to the integrity of Arkansas’s elections, it is the state’s consistently low voter turnout, particularly among Black voters.”
The Arkansas Supreme Court struck down a voter ID law in 2014, construing it as a new “qualification” for voters, beyond those laid out in the state constitution. In 2018, though, the court upheld a similar law.
Voters elected a conservative justice to the state Supreme Court last year, after a GOP group in Washington, D.C., spent big in the nonpartisan race. The new justice created a narrow conservative majority. Recent conservative high court candidates have been closely tied to the Republican Party.
A bill introduced in the Arkansas legislature in February would have shifted the state to partisan judicial races, a move that only one state — North Carolina — has made in the past century. However, that bill stalled in committee.
McDade and Jackson’s tragically intertwined lives tell the story of a society that feeds on and maintains oppression through punishment, violence, and isolation. They also show us a way out.
