Historic race riots, COVID cases climb and the return of manned space flight

The week of the greatest civil unrest in a generation overshadowed the largest death toll in a century.

And that hard-to-imagine statement doesn’t even take into account what should be the news of the week: That manned space flight returned to Florida for the first time in nearly a decade.

WHAT EVERYONE IS WATCHING

Instead, our attention has been glued to the protests from coast to coast all while the nation reels from another haunting milestone: 100,000 deaths in the U.S. from the coronavirus.

Reopenings halted: The protests arrived in Florida over the weekend. They prompted mayors across the state to announce curfews and Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez to announce Sunday that beaches will not reopen Monday as expected. The planned reopening was designed to kickoff the county’s tourism industry after 10 weeks of stalled activity under COVID-19 orders.

Instead, the activity came in the form of bodies swarming not on beaches, but streets — to demonstrate against the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man who pleaded for air and his mother as a white Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck.

Marchers across the state: Saturday’s demonstrations happened in every major city in Florida. In downtown Miami, they began peacefully then spawned vandalism, theft and damaged storefronts as police were set ablaze. On Sunday, at least 1,500 people marched from Huizenga Plaza to the Fort Lauderdale police station and the peaceful protests again became violent as protesters threw plastic water bottles at the officers who immediately retaliated with tear gas and rubber bullets.

Twitter tags Trump: In the historical timeline of this moment, Florida will get its notch. It always does. President Trump called Minnesota’s protesters “thugs” and tweeted the words of former Miami police chief Walter Headley: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

Did Trump even know that Headley’s aggressive policies in black neighborhoods led to violence in the late 1960s? It didn’t matter. In a historic rebuke against its most popular account, Twitter tagged Trump’s tweet for “glorifying violence.”

Launch respite: The racial unrest also overshadowed the president’s return to Florida since the arrival of the coronavirus. He came for the first launch of astronauts from American soil in nine years. The successful launch took two tries as the first scheduled attempt was postponed because of bad weather.

During both visits, Gov. Ron DeSantis was at the president’s side, perhaps to work out a plan to finalize their mutual interest in moving the Republican National Convention from Charlotte to Florida. The president complained he didn’t want a convention hampered by social-distancing restrictions.

WHAT WE’RE WATCHING

Scourge of the old and frail: COVID-19 deaths, meanwhile, keep rising, doubling during the month of May. By Saturday, the grim toll had a clear target: more than 50% of the Florida victims to date were residents of nursing homes and assisted living facilities. They also accounted for 70% of all deaths in the last week.

Infected employees, but where is the state? The deadly numbers also have us with a few questions for the Agency for Health Care Administration. The agency that regulates nursing homes had taken few emergency actions against nursing homes and assisted living facilities all year until May. That’s when state officials buoyed by concerns over the infectiousness of COVID-19, issued emergency orders against five facilities. They suspended assisted living facilities in Miami and Hialeah for allowing staff members who tested positive for COVID-19 to continue working with residents. Was that a lesson learned? State officials won’t say what kind of monitoring, if any, is being done to track homes with employees working at multiple locations.

Antibody testing expands: For the first time on Friday, Florida released numbers of COVID-19 antibody tests performed at drive-thru sites in Miami Gardens, West Palm Beach, Orlando and Jacksonville. But while some believe the data could offer one indicator of how widespread the disease has become, doctors and researchers say they do not know for sure if a past COVID-19 infection — and the antibodies to the disease that develop from it — provides any protective immunity.

High court picks: DeSantis lowered his profile more in the last week than he had in the previous month. His only scheduled news conference was in Miami, where he showed why the non-elected Federalist Society may be one of the most powerful forces in all of state government. The governor named Palm Beach County Judge Renatha Francis and Miami lawyer John Couriel to the Florida Supreme Court. Both had been recommended by the Federalist Society, the conservative-libertarian organization with which the governor himself is affiliated.

Rivera’s network: Fallout over former congressman David Rivera’s $50 million contract to provide consulting services for Venezuela’s state-run oil company continues. The latest: Miami-Dade Commissioner Steve Bovo fired Esther Nuhfer from his campaign for mayor after the Miami Herald reported Rivera paid Nuhfer’s firm, Communication Solutions, $3.5 million from proceeds of the contract.

Recount wrongs: Broward County’s 2018 election and recount were so rife with problems that the county’s auditor was unable to verify the accuracy of reported vote totals despite a lengthy review, according to a draft audit published last week. County Auditor Bob Melton’s staff found that half the county’s polling places reported more votes than voters, and that mail ballots weren’t properly tracked, monitored or processed in a timely manner. Other, previously well-documented issues noted in the audit included the poor design of the ballot and the misplacement of more than 2,000 ballots during the recount.

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