https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/coronavirus-crisis-ron-desantis-florida-covid-19-strategy/
Yes, it's NR, but it's a GREAT READ explaining how DeSantis managed Florida.
He put a LOT of focus on nursing homes, long term care facilities, and protecting the vulnerable.
One thing that struck me as really smart? Prioritizing PPE for those locations.
The whole article is worth your time. Does well explaining Florida's gameplan and how it was executed.
Yes, it's NR, but it's a GREAT READ explaining how DeSantis managed Florida.
Quote:
An irony of the national coverage of the coronavirus crisis is that at the same time DeSantis was being made into a villain, New York governor Andrew Cuomo was being elevated as a hero, even though the DeSantis approach to nursing homes was obviously superior to that of Cuomo. Florida went out of its way to get COVID-19-positive people out of nursing homes, while New York went out of its way to get them in, a policy now widely acknowledged to have been a debacle.
The media didn't exactly have their eyes on the ball. "The day that the media had their first big freakout about Florida was March 15th," DeSantis recalls, "which was, there were people on Clearwater Beach, and it was this big deal. That same day is when we signed the executive order to, one, ban visitation in the nursing homes, and two, ban the reintroduction of a COVID-positive patient back into a nursing home."
He put a LOT of focus on nursing homes, long term care facilities, and protecting the vulnerable.
Quote:
At the outset, DeSantis looked at South Korea's experience: "I just thought it was so dramatic, the extent to which this was concentrated in the older age groups. I think the first real fresh set of South Korea numbers I looked at, I think it had no fatalities under 30, and then 80 percent of them were 70 and above or something like that. It was really, really dramatic."
Then there was Italy: "I think a lot of the policymakers in the U.S. acted like Italy would happen in the United States, but when you look under the hood of Italy, there were huge differences, and there were reasons why that part of Italy fared as poorly as it did. I think the median age of fatality was something like 82 in some of those areas in Northern Italy. So we looked at that, but that really helped inform the strategy to focus most of our efforts on the at-risk groups."
He was hesitant about sweeping lockdowns, given that there wasn't much of a precedent for them. "One of the things that bothered me throughout this whole time was, I researched the 1918 pandemic, '57, '68, and there were some mitigation efforts done in May 1918, but never just a national-shutdown type deal," he says. "There was really no observed experience about what the negative impacts would be on that."
"So I was very concerned about things on that side as well," he continues, "and I think that's why I had a more nuanced and balanced approach than some of the other governors. Because you have some of these health officials saying, 'You've got to do this. This is science,' or whatever. But really, these were unchartered territories."
The DeSantis team also didn't put much stock in dire projections. "We kind of lost confidence very early on in models," a Florida health official says. "We look at them closely, but how can you rely on something when it says you're peaking in a week and then the next day you've already peaked?" Instead, "we started really focusing on just what we saw."
One thing that struck me as really smart? Prioritizing PPE for those locations.
Quote:
Florida, DeSantis notes, "required all staff and any worker that entered to be screened for COVID illness, temperature checks. Anybody that's symptomatic would just simply not be allowed to go in." And it required staff to wear PPE. "We put our money where our mouth is," he continues. "We recognized that a lot of these facilities were just not prepared to deal with something like this. So we ended up sending a total of 10 million masks just to our long-term-care facilities, a million gloves, half a million face shields."
Florida fortified the hospitals with PPE, too, but DeSantis realized that it wouldn't do the hospitals any good if infection in the nursing homes ran out of control : "If I can send PPE to the nursing homes, and they can prevent an outbreak there, that's going to do more to lower the burden on hospitals than me just sending them another 500,000 N95 masks."
The whole article is worth your time. Does well explaining Florida's gameplan and how it was executed.
