On Monday, Florida state health officials announced the first day of single-digit deaths from COVID-19 for the first time in seven months.
“The state health department said seven more Floridians and two additional non-residents have died due to COVID-19,” The Palm Beach Post reported on Sunday. “Over the past two weeks, daily reported COVID deaths across the state have ranged between 22 and 98, and the week-to-week reported deaths have been on a slow decline since January.”
The New York Times reported, “Florida reopened months before much of the rest of the nation, which only in recent days has begun to emerge from the better part of a year under lockdown.”
According to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, his decision to reopen the state before much of the country originally received “a lot of opposition from the corporate media” for going “against the grain.”
“But, our kids are in school. Parents are happy with that. Our economy is growing. People are working. And they were predicting economic doom, particularly for Florida, because we’re a tourism base and our tourism isn’t bad by any stretch,” DeSantis added.
Florida’s death per capita rate from COVID-19 still falls below the United States average, while the number of active cases plummet.
According to the New York Times, in early March 2021, “The unemployment rate [in Florida] is 5.1 percent, compared to 9.3 percent in California, 8.7 percent in New York and 6.9 percent in Texas. That debate about opening schools? It came and went months ago. Children have been in classrooms since the fall.”
