Landing at Palm Beach International Airport, I was ready to see how the other half lived. The healthy half of COVID, I mean.
Our family had not left New York since March. We had read about how Florida was able to maintain a case rate similar to or less than New York while avoiding our paralyzing blocks. Still, we were apprehensive. “Be careful down there, no one wears a mask,” was a typical piece of advice I got from well-meaning friends.
And indeed, Florida has a reputation for being one of the most lost states. In mid-April, after a short block, Governor Ron DeSantis gave the go-ahead for the beaches to open. “Wait two weeks!” pessimists insisted then. But two weeks have come and gone, and Florida’s numbers have remained relatively stable after peaking in mid-July.
Leaving the plane, we noticed something strange: everyone was, in fact, masked. And keeping your distance. There was hand sanitizer everywhere. The COVID world “Mad Max” was nowhere to be found. Yes, everything was open, but in terms of precautions, South Florida looked a lot like New York.
The main difference: masks are not used in risk-free situations. In Gotham, it is very common to see people in masks even when alone on empty streets. Young children wear masks outside. In Florida, we saw children without a mask playing together outside. It looked like Before Times.
Which is a good thing: we act like it’s no big deal to wear masks, even when the risk doesn’t exist. But, of course, it matters. In Florida, we saw smiling faces of strangers for the first time in nine months. It is difficult to exaggerate how important this is to our well-being and the feeling of normalcy. There is also the element of pandemic fatigue: wearing a mask at all times, even when unnecessary, at some point discourages use when it really matters.
It is a lie, however, that Floridians are not taking the new coronavirus seriously. What they did was to discard policies that don’t work, while retaining those that work.
Governor Andrew Cuomo, on the day he closed meals in New York City, noted that the spread of COVID in restaurants reached 1.4% of cases. In Florida, they decided that numbers like that meant that indoor restaurants remained open. In New York, we foolishly didn’t do it.
In Florida, DeSantis prioritized the opening of schools. In New York, Cuomo puffed out his chest and said he was in charge of the schools, but then he washed their hands when it came time to do the hard work of opening them.
And Florida’s policies have borne fruit. On January 9, New York reported 17,839 new cases. Florida, with about 2 million people more than New York, had 15,445. An open state like Florida with fewer COVID cases than an almost closed state like New York proves that prolonged blockages are a failure.
And that disparity has prompted people like Rich Azzopardi, a senior adviser from Cuomo, to launch bizarre conspiracy theories on Twitter that Florida “invented the book on case numbers”. It is much more difficult to admit that your boss destroyed restaurants and other businesses for no reason.
Even though Florida is somehow hiding numbers, the bodies are more difficult to hide. Florida had 22,000 COVID-19 deaths versus 38,000 in New York. The virus reached both states at the same time.
Not even time can explain the difference. Yes, Floridians tend to be outdoors thanks to the mild climate of the State of the Sun. But that does not explain why the virus is out of control in California.
Florida, then, shows that perhaps moderation is really the key to fighting COVID-19. A New Yorker in Florida constantly asks himself, “Why doesn’t my own state government trust me the way the government here trusts its people?”
New York officials do not believe that our people will do the right thing for themselves and their neighbors. Our lives are held hostage to Cuomo’s whims. Floridenses know what to expect and this normalizes their lives to a great extent.
They have sanity. We do not.
Twitter: @Karol