DeSantis Thinks His Pandemic Policies Don't Get Enough Love

On Valentine's Day, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis appeared on a Fox News (of course) interview to complain that his policies aren't getting the respect they deserve for keeping its economy humming by mostly ignoring virus mitigation.

Before we begin, let's assess the credibility of the source we're talking about.  First, DeSantis is governor of Florida, a place where politics are equal parts stupid and dangerous. 

Second, DeSantis is a Trump sycophant who supported the Big Lie that the last election was stolen. He said misleading things in his interview too. He repeatedly called President Biden a "lockdowner," even though Biden has never proposed locking down anything. He said Transportation Secretary Buttigieg and the CDC want to impose domestic travel restrictions. He conveniently left out that two days before his interview the White House said they were considering no such thing. 

Third, he persecutes people who question his disinformation.  This summer DeSantis fired a state data scientist who refused to manipulate data to make his reopening plan look safe. He then had her arrested in a guns-out police raid at her home for supposedly "hacking" a mailing list for which the logon was publicly available. 

Finally it seems that DeSantis is opportunistically trying to use the pandemic to raise his profile in the GOP for a presidential run. Meanwhile, his top pandemic response guy is resigning, so that instead of implementing DeSantis's powerful pandemic policies he can "spend more time with his family." M'kay.

Now that we've evaluated the source, let's look at the actual claims. In DeSantis's Fox interview he said, "[New York has] way higher per capita patients hospitalized right now, so there's no basis in medical, no basis in economics or in reality except to punish a state that is doing it better than what his experts have recommended."  

Does New York have "way higher" hospitalizations right now?  To find out I got data from the Covid Tracking Project. As noted in an earlier post, when making comparisons it's very important to use per-capita rates and look at averages rather than daily numbers.  So, I calculated hospitalizations per 100K* 7-day moving average from the CTP data:

Right now, New York is indeed higher than Florida. Is it a "lot higher?" Not by the standards of the whole chart. In period from the beginning of the chart to September 1 Florida had around 10 to 12 times the hospitalization rate of New York. For the last few days Florida has been slightly above that national rate. Nothing to brag about there.

Here are the data for new cases and deaths:

Here the pattern is much the same, except that the Florida vs. New York differences are not that big right now.  Florida deaths and cases were way above the national figures from the beginning of July until November, which were themselves quite a bit above New York.

I think it's fair to ask: If DeSantis's pandemic policies are so awesome, how do we explain the period before November when the same Florida policies were in place, yet Florida was doing much worse than New York? Could it be that something else has happened recently—like winter weather driving people in cold climates inside—that is making Florida look better and New York worse?

DeSantis's other claim is that the Florida economy is in great shape. True? I tried really hard to find some actual numbers, but unfortunately it's hard to get state-level economic numbers that are timely. A couple of Friends who live in Florida say tourism has taken a big hit but the state doesn't seem to be as bad off as they anticipated.  So, to make a judgment on DeSantis's economic claims, I'll have to just consider the source.

*Population figures are the latest from the Census Bureau Population Clock, so the per 100K figures may underestimate true values for earlier time periods. But since all calculations used population figures from February 14, comparisons are still valid.

Image by Corona-zona