As death toll passes 80,000, COVID-19 fades as election issue in Florida

The number of Floridians who have died of COVID-19 passed 80,000 this month, another tragic milestone amid the latest wave that’s still killing as many as 400 state residents a week.

But as the race for governor enters its final stretch, the pandemic has barely played any role in the campaigns.

DeSantis’ “freedom” agenda celebrates the state’s lack of COVID restrictions. Democrat Charlie Crist’s attacks on DeSantis have focused on abortion rights and culture wars. COVID policy isn’t listed among the main issues on Crist’s campaign website.

“For most voters, it’s just not high on the priority list,” said Aubrey Jewett, a professor of political science at the University of Central Florida. “If you ask voters, ‘What’s your top five issues?’ maybe you get number five, but it’s just not top-of-mind awareness. Many voters have moved past that issue. And they’re concerned about the economy and other things.”

Kenneth Goodman, founder and director of the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine’s Institute for Bioethics and Health, said the unknowns of the COVID pandemic in Florida were largely managed in spite of the “intentionally weaponized” response from many state officials.

“We’re all tired of COVID, and we’re hoping it goes away,” Goodman said. “But the reason everything is down is because of vaccination, masks, and social distancing when it was at its worst.”

DeSantis joined other governors in locking down the state in April 2020 and continued restrictions such as bar closures and limited capacity for restaurants and other business until that September.

But since about July 2020, when DeSantis said of the pandemic in a speech, “Jobs have been lost. Businesses have been shuttered. Families have been separated,” but did not mention COVID deaths, the governor’s message has been one of “freedom” from lockdowns, mask requirements, social distancing and COVID vaccination mandates.

Rejecting restrictions

At an event in Orange County last month, DeSantis blasted Democratic officials who wanted him to impose further COVID restrictions when cases began to rise two years ago in July 2020.

“If we had done that would they had wanted to do, this state would be in the toilet right now,” DeSantis said. “We made the right decision by keeping the state open.”

DeSantis did not mention that by the end of that month, Florida was the epicenter of the COVID epidemic, with 257 deaths reported on July 31 alone. More than 4,300 COVID-related deaths were reported that August in the first of four major waves of the virus in the state.

DeSantis has often compared Florida favorably to Democratic states such as New York and California when it came to death rates.

But comparing different states is difficult, said Jason Salemi, associate professor of epidemiology at the University of South Florida College of Public Health. New York suffered much of its COVID deaths early in the pandemic, while California and Florida have experienced different waves.

In Florida, though, more than half of the state’s 80,000-plus COVID deaths came after the full introduction of vaccines in the spring of 2021, ranking Florida second in the county and 13th per capita in what it calls “preventable” COVID deaths, according to the Brown School of Public Health.

“Our worst wave came after widespread availability of vaccines and was probably due to a confluence of factors,” Salemi said. “But the timing of the worst peak for various states, in terms of mortality, has differed. … It’s really hard to go into a time machine and say, ‘What would have happened if we would have done things differently in California or New York or in Florida?’ It’s unfortunately an impossible question to answer.”

This summer, Florida has led the country in COVID deaths for three straight months, with about 71 people a day dying at the latest wave’s peak in July. Salemi said that could be expected, as Florida is the third-largest state in terms of population.

But, Salemi said, “mortality in the current wave in Florida [has] not been mild. … We’ve had four waves in Florida in which we had more than 200 deaths per day at our peak, so it’s much less than other waves. But when you have 71 people who are dying at the peak in a wave each day, that’s not what I would call trivial.”

There were about 400 COVID deaths a week in Florida in August, according to the latest CDC report.

Mostly silent Democrats

Despite the ongoing pandemic deaths, Democrats’ messaging on COVID has been muddled over the last year.

The party has largely followed the lead of President Biden’s administration, which trumpeted the lifting of mask recommendations last year amid an aborted attempt to get back to normal by the Fourth of July, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which eased its guidelines and said COVID was “here to stay” in August.

Nationwide, Democrats have been cautious about COVID policies after the backlash against masks and lockdowns, especially following Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s victory last year.

During his campaign, Youngkin criticized the state’s school closure policies.

Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul ended the mask mandate on public transportation just this past week. In Florida, Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried, then running for governor, posted a photo of herself maskless on plane after the Transportation Security Administration ended its rule requiring masks on planes in April. “Peace out to the TSA mask mandate,” she wrote.

Still, a majority of Americans in an April AP-NORC poll, 56%, were in favor of mask requirements on planes, trains and buses. But by August, a New York Times poll found the share of even “very liberal” people who said COVID was a great risk to their own personal health fell 13 points from earlier in the year to just 34%.

“They can see public opinion polls as well as anyone,” Jewett said. “So Democrats are trying to hit other things that they think are more important, or that voters care about.”

But, he said, “I do sometimes wonder if there isn’t potentially an opening [on the issue]. Because a lot of times in politics, voters don’t care about things until you start bringing them up.”

DeSantis has gone further than many other GOP governors, holding roundtables with “natural immunity” supporters, telling high school students to take off their masks at a press conference, and not recommending COVID vaccines for children, which he has dismissed as “baby jabs.”

The governor also battled local school boards and governments over their continued mask mandates following his order in 2021 allowing parents to ignore them.

Crist’s running mate Karla Hernandez-Mats, the Miami teachers union president, alluded to the controversy at an Orlando event Tuesday but immediately pivoted to the campaign’s abortion rights message.

“What’s funny is that they actually attacked me for keeping our kids safe in our schools and preventing unnecessary illness and death,” Hernandez-Mats said. “And yet they turn around and literally risk the lives of every woman in the state by preventing any legal exemptions, including life-saving procedures. At every turn, Ron finds a way to play God with our lives.”

Republican National Committee spokeswoman Julia Friedland criticized Hernandez-Mats on school closures and mask mandates, calling her “the perfect fit for lockdown lover Crist’s unpopular, anti-parents campaign.”

Mistakes were made

Goodman acknowledged that any decision to close schools or require masks would affect children’s education, but he defended officials who made the call.

“It wasn’t that it was a mistake,” Goodman said. “It wasn’t that we overreacted. You have to play with the cards you’re dealt, and they were probabilistic cards in an environment of a brand new pathogen. I think I think the public health authorities did a brilliant job.

“Did they make mistakes? Of course they did. But everybody who likes to criticize should imagine that was their decision, where if you make the wrong decision, a lot of people die,” he added.

Despite people’s lessening concerns about COVID, the disease will still be a major issue going forward, Goodman said. Part of the problem is that most people don’t understand the risks involved in getting sick with the virus.

“We’ve known for some time that that kind of uncertainty and that kind of fear can be leveraged for political gain,” Goodman said. “Because people like to feel like they’re freedom-loving. [But] with freedom comes responsibility. And in the current political environment, we weren’t interested in responsibility. We were only interested in freedom.”

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