8/16/2023 0 Comments Florida corona virusHis order argues his state had "achieved several critical benchmarks in flattening the curve."įormer Arkansas Govs. He defended that decision with appeals to the public health strategy of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) at the time. Brian Kemp, a Republican, saying, "I disagree strongly with decision to open certain facilities."Ī week later, DeSantis kicked off Florida's reopening process, allowing restaurants and other businesses to open their doors to a limited capacity. At a coronavirus press briefing on April 22, 2020, Trump targeted Georgia Gov. Shortly afterward, Georgia, Alaska and Oklahoma attracted criticism from health officials and then-President Trump for partially reopening businesses in their states. Florida reopened aggressively, along with other Republican statesĭeSantis wasn't the first governor to risk reopening businesses, but he was one of the Republican governors who moved more quickly to do so than health experts recommended at the time.īy April 16, 2020, the Trump administration had released a reopening plan for states that advocated unwinding mitigation measures in stages as cases and deaths decreased - a so-called "gating" strategy. We've got to stop with this COVID theater," DeSantis said. "We should be trusting people to make good decisions," DeSantis said.īy 2022, the governor's rhetoric had soured so much on masks that he asked a group of students wearing face coverings at his press conference to take them off. The governor told reporters he'd never force the measure "under penalty of criminal law." When Florida experienced its first big surge in the summer of 2020, doctors representing Physicians for Social Responsibility gathered outside the governor's mansion to ask DeSantis to impose a mask mandate. Hutchinson signed a state-wide mask mandate during a surge of cases in his state in the summer of 2020 that he kept in place for 8 months, while Burgum issued a mask mandate for a few months to slow the spread over the holiday season that year. Still, local governments in Miami, Orlando, and other big Florida cities leaned on the policy to try to blunt the spread. On mask mandates, DeSantis was in the minority as one of 11 state chief executives who resisted imposing the strategy at any point during the COVID pandemic after the CDC started recommending that people wear masks outside their houses in April 2020. DeSantis and minority of state chief executives opposed mask mandates The DeSantis campaign did not respond to a request for comment. "Our social distancing, our wearing masks is what is working in Arkansas." Anthony Fauci's guidance that all states impose shelter-in-place orders. "We want to do things that actually work and make a difference," Hutchinson said when he was pressed by PBS on why he ignored Dr. Still, both governors, who are also running for president, did close gyms, restaurants and other places identified as high risk by early April. That's a national pause button," DeSantis said.ĭeSantis made the same policy decision made by the majority of governors in the country, but two of DeSantis' 2024 challengers, Asa Hutchinson, then the governor of Arkansas, and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum bucked the trend, refusing to issue stay-at-home policies, along with five other conservative governors. "When the president did the 30-day extension, to me that was - people aren't just going to go back to work. Previously, he'd been resisting, even amid reports that people were flocking to Florida during spring break. Just four days later, DeSantis started a partial shutdown of Florida stores and beaches.Īfter Trump extended national safer-at-home guidelines, the governor issued his version of a 30-day stay-at-home order on April 1, asking people to refrain from non-essential activities. He closed schools in the early weeks of the pandemic just as all 49 other states did in fact, Florida schools closed to in-person instruction a couple of days before New York schools did.īy March 16, 2020, when about 6,000 cases of COVID were confirmed in the U.S., President Donald Trump's administration announced social distancing guidelines and states around the country began to issue stay-at-home orders. Florida's early lockdown resembled those in much of U.S.ĭeSantis declared a state of emergency on COVID in Florida before the U.S.
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