Ron DeSantis vs. Blue States: Florida Shines in Coronavirus Response

He also issued a 14-day quarantine for individuals entering Florida from virus hotspots.After weeks of intense media scrutiny, Florida is outshining its blue state counterparts as DeSantis’s highly criticized coronavirus response proves to be right.This becomes even more evident when Florida is compared to a state like New York, whose governor the establishment media have heaped praise upon throughout the pandemic.Florida — which tends to have an older, more vulnerable population — had 42,038 confirmed cases of the virus and 1,875 related deaths as of Friday morning. New York, with a population of over 19 million — over 8 million in New York City alone— has seen an excess of 343,000 confirmed cases of the virus and 22,170 deaths, despite the implementation of draconian lockdown orders.“You look at some of the most draconian orders that have been issued in some of these states and compare Florida in terms of our hospitalizations per 100,000, in terms of our fatalities per 100,000,” DeSantis said during an April 28 meeting with the president.“I mean you go from D.C., Maryland, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, you name it; Florida’s done better,” he continued, stressing that his remarks were not to be taken as a criticism of other states.“But everyone in the media was saying Florida was going to be like New York or Italy, and that has not happened because we understood we have a big, diverse state,” he continued, defending his tailored approach.“We understood the outbreak was not uniform throughout the state, and we had a tailored and measured approach that not only helped our numbers be way below what anyone predicted, but also did less damage to our state going forward,” he said.“I had construction going on, the road projects. So I think people can go back and look at all the criticism and then look now,” he added, noting that hospitals never came near capacity, nor did the state run low on ventilators.“We’ve had people in the hospital, but I’m now in a situation where I have less than 500 people in a state of 22 million on ventilators as of last night,” he said during the April 28 meeting.Even the left-leaning Politico admitted that the Florida governor’s fine-tuned approach proved to be successful.“First, let’s just come out and say it: DeSantis looks more right than those who criticized the Sunshine State’s coronavirus response,” the authors, Marc Caputo and Renuka Rayasam, noted:According to the latest Florida figures, fewer than 2,000 have died, and around 43,000 have been infected.