The big chill
To the editor:
There is something bone chilling in seeing the governor of your state rubbing his hands and gleefully reporting that “More people have died of (the) covid (pandemic) since Biden took office than died under the Trump administration in 2020.” Our GOP-led state government has sabotaged the public health efforts, and is indeed suing, with taxpayers’ money to prevent safety measures from being enforced.
Of course DeSantis’ facts are, well, wrong. When Trump left office in January, Reuters estimated the U.S. death toll at 424,000 residents. 3,764 per day died under the Trump era, and 69,000 were infected daily at the apex. Loosely paraphrasing Marie Antoinette, the Republic strategy has been: let them eat dirt. This put over 400,000 Americans in their graves prematurely during Trump’s tenure. To that number add 216,000 since Biden’s election (Center for Disease Control). The decrease is largely due to the vaccinations discovered, and the Biden team getting the shots in arms.
The vaccinated, unless compromised with other illnesses, largely prevailed over COVID exposure. The newer deaths have almost exclusively come from the GOP southern strategy of misrepresenting facts, demonizing vaccination, and politicizing health safety measures, and preventing infection deterrence strategies from being implemented in Florida and elsewhere. Florida is No. 13 in this hit parade of Republican led states where COVID deaths are still on the march as their administrations are willfully negligent, refusing to implement safe health policy. The rest of the nation seems to have largely moved on from this pandemic. The Florida governor deserves the “credit” in large measure for this awful state of affairs in Florida, where 20% of the entire nation’s infections occurred in the post-Trump summer (Politico). The pandemic that we here have seen in 2021 has been a daily death rate claiming the lives, almost exclusively, of unvaccinated Floridians.
While seven children died of COVID during the school closure, 146,604 infections were added from July 30 to Sept. 2, 2021. Child hospitalizations increased 40% in Florida, and one in five infections nationwide occurred in Florida this summer. According to the Tampa Bay times over 200 pediatric cases are hospitalized in Florida per week, as of September, 2021. Kids with masks are less likely to catch the bug. When they were required to wear masks to school children are safer.
To see Gov. DeSantis revel in the body count is deeply disturbing. It suggests very questionable priorities. He has called a special legislative session; not to protect us from rising sea water, nor to mobilize to keep our home insurance costs reasonable in Florida against hurricanes and floods loss, nor to curb the rise in gas prices. Rather he is calling a special legislative session to throw a temper tantrum over the masking and vaccination mandates that have decreased the death rates everywhere they were implemented.
Ellen Starbird
Cape Coral