Cheap flights, cheap hotels and the chance to have fun in a very sunny and virtually unrestricted Covid-19 place created a “perfect storm” in the midst of the South Florida pandemic, the mayor of Miami warned on Monday.
And local officials are preparing for more confusion on spring break, like the type that occurred over the weekend in Miami Beach, when the crowd got too big and wild and the police cracked down hard, he said.
“There is no doubt that Miami, the Miami area and the state are probably one of the most open states in the entire country,” Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, a Republican, told MSNBC. “It created a kind of perfect storm, where you have people who can come to Miami. It is very cheap. I am told that some flights cost $ 50 and even hotels are very cheap. So it has been a very difficult mix of cheap flights, cheap hotels and being known as probably the most open place in the country. “
Suarez spoke a day after city leaders across Miami Beach’s Biscayne Bay voted to extend the curfew at 8 pm in the South Beach entertainment district until the end of this month and possibly until mid-April.
“Obviously, we are preparing for the possibility that there may be repercussions for some of these actions that are taken in Miami Beach with curfews and the early closure of the sidewalks of people entering Miami Beach, so we are prepared for that” , he said.
Suarez’s concerns about a deluge of visitors from far and wide on spring break who do not want to wear masks or practice social detachment – and are not obliged by local authorities to do so – have been echoed by public health experts for weeks.
“Any event that involves increased travel and people relaxing preventive measures is a concern,” Amber D’Souza, professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told NBC News. “This is exactly what we saw after Thanksgiving and Christmas … It is an ongoing cycle and an ongoing concern.”
The crowded South Florida has been the epicenter of the pandemic in a state where more than 2 million people were infected and 33,369 died from Covid-19, according to the most recent count by NBC News.
Since February, when the invasion began, Miami Beach police have made more than 1,000 arrests – half of them residents from outside the state.
Local police were pushed to the limit, so Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber called for reinforcements from neighboring communities in Dade County, as well as Florida Highway Patrol.
And the crowds that arrived in Miami Beach are different this year, said the mayor.
“I don’t think it’s a kind of spring break, because I don’t think they’re university students,” he said on Sunday. “I think the nature of what we are facing here changes. I think there are very few places that have been opened as our state has been opened. “
In Florida, as is the case in most parts of the country, the daily numbers of cases, deaths and hospitalizations for Covid-19 have decreased as more and more people are being vaccinated, according to data from NBC News.
But the state leads the country in variants that are even more contagious, and the positivity rate of the Covid-19 test has been rising lately, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican who appears to be positioning himself as the heir to former President Donald Trump in the White House, has been harshly criticized for his pandemic performance and accused by Democratic and other rivals of using the vaccine distribution to score political points with key constituents, such as the elderly.
DeSantis defended his decision not to impose masked mandates and to lift restrictions on the economy and appealed to the advice of some of the same scientists that Trump trusted, such as Dr. Scott Atlas and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, both from Stanford University, The South Florida Sun-Sentinel reporting.
Among other things, his direct approach to the pandemic, opposition to the blockades and skepticism about the effectiveness of the masks were denounced by most public health experts.
Although the initial distribution of vaccines was marked by chaos and poor planning, on Monday about a quarter of the state’s population had received at least one injection and 13% were fully vaccinated, according to New York Times statistics. This puts Florida (the third most populous state in the country) on a par with California (the most populous state in the country) and slightly behind more than half of the other states, although not much.
