Editorial Roundup: Florida

Recent editorials from Florida newspapers:

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March 10

The Palm Beach Post on vaccine inequity in Florida:

Gov. Ron DeSantis has a snappy comeback to criticism of the way he’s rolling out COVID-19 vaccines in Florida:

“I’m not worried about your income bracket, I’m worried about your age bracket.”

Fair enough. Sounds more or less scientific. Because the governor is right about one essential characteristic of the coronavirus: its ability to kill you is much higher if you are an older person.

Thus, DeSantis has stood by a single-minded approach that stands in contrast to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines. His mantra: Inoculate the aged before everyone else. Not even the essential workers forced to interact with the public, day in and day out, should come before anybody 65 and older - starting next week, 60 and older.

And now DeSantis has said explicitly that no longer will he prioritize occupations. So, if you’re a farmworker, you’re not on Florida’s priority list - even though the farming areas of Palm Beach County and elsewhere are among the most highly infected places in the state.

At the same time, we’ve been learning that some gated communities where donors have been writing whopping checks to DeSantis in the last few months have been able to jump the line. Florida’s two top Democratic officials, Agriculture Secretary Nikki Fried and Senate Democratic Leader Gary Farmer, have called on the U.S. Justice Department to investigate what they allege is a “pay to play” scheme by the governor to direct vaccines to ultra-wealthy ZIP codes.

DO INCOME BRACKETS MATTER?

It looks like income brackets do matter.

Let’s look first at that upper end. According to news reports, over 1,200 homeowners of the exclusive Ocean Reef Club, in north Key Largo, got shots in January, a time when the vaccine was in short supply.

One particular Ocean Reef resident, Bruce Rauner, a former Republican governor of Illinois and head of a private-equity firm, gave a $250,000 check to DeSantis’ political action committee – part of $3.9 million DeSantis received since December.

DeSantis said the shots were decided not by him but by a “South Florida hospital,” later identified as Baptist Health System. But Baptist said in a statement that “the State of Florida asked Baptist Health to take delivery … to the Medical Center at Ocean Reef.” (Emphasis added.)

It gets worse. While Ocean Reef residents were being treated to shots, Baptist Health announced it was canceling all first-dose appointments for Jan. 20 and taking no new ones. Too bad for the many seniors and people with underlying conditions who’d been expecting their jabs.

And on Florida’s Southwest Coast, three upscale communities got picked for pop-up vaccination sites. The three were developed by a GOP fundraiser who served on DeSantis’ transition team named Pat Neal. At one of the communities, only people from two ZIP codes were eligible for the shots, their names chosen by a county commissioner who put herself on the list.

DeSantis has denied anything untoward. His office scoffs that critics are just playing politics. We say: Investigate.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks the media at a coronavirus vaccination site at Lakewood Ranch last month in Bradenton.

Meantime, DeSantis’ blind spots concerning the poor and the non-white keep endangering the public’s health. The Palm Beach Post Editorial Board, early on, urged the governor to prioritize these groups so highly vulnerable to contracting and spreading the virus. His response has been anything but that.

MIGRANTS AND FARMWORKERS

On Friday, DeSantis brushed aside the pleas of farmworker advocates to say he won’t prioritize any more groups for vaccines. This was a few days after agreeing that school employees, police and firefighters age 50 and up could get shots along with seniors.

“We’re not doing any more occupation changes,” he said.

What an error. For migrant workers, especially, their “occupation” is much more than their labor. It is a life. It is how they eat and sleep (often in group dwellings), how they socialize (often only among themselves), how they travel (together in buses).

Small wonder that in the Glades, about one in seven people have been infected, according to state health officials. In Indiantown, about one in six. In Immokalee, east of Naples, things got so bad that help arrived from Doctors Without Borders.

Farming is a crucial industry in Palm Beach County. The farmworkers’ employers, the owners of the big agricultural concerns, should be adding their voices to the cries to get workers inoculated.

Perhaps DeSantis is ignoring farmworkers to evade the political charge of vaccinating undocumented workers ahead of full-fledged citizens. The answer to that is simple: The virus does not look at documents. The virus simply looks for bodies. The more bodies it can find, the more it will spread. The more it spreads, the more it will mutate. The more it mutates, the longer this pandemic will last.

If DeSantis will not act, the federal government should. FEMA ought to set up vaccination-mobiles to go from farm site to farm site. And when they’re finished in the fields, take them to underserved pockets of places like Lake Worth Beach, where the working poor are afraid to step out of the shadows to show ID or don’t have computers to make appointments.

The working poor are getting the short stick in DeSantis’ vaccine rollout. This is bad for all.

Online: https://www.palmbeachpost.com

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March 6

The Daytona Beach News-Journal on habitat destruction and an increase in manatee deaths:

When people look at a newspaper page, they tend to look at the pictures first. And there was a picture on the front of last Sunday’s News-Journal that told an entire story, if you knew what to look for - and what was missing.

It’s the same picture that’s printed above this editorial: Two manatees floating side-by-side in murky water, flippers brushing a sandy floor dotted with a few small clumps of vegetation.

If you’ve seen manatees before, you probably recognized that something wasn’t quite right. And if you were really familiar with Florida’s beloved sea cows, you spotted it immediately:

Those manatees look way too skinny.

But there’s something else going on here. The nearly bare, sandy bottom should be covered in long, waving strands of seagrass twisting up from from the sand and rippling in shallow sunlit water. To the manatees, that seagrass is dinner. The grass is also a home for crabs, shrimp, turtles; tiny fish and bigger ones that breed and thrive in seagrass beds. They’re not there either, not even hidden - because there is no place to hide.

What you are looking at, readers, is trouble. Big trouble for the vast, complex and magically diverse system known as the Indian River Lagoon. Because this is not an isolated scene. As reported last week by The News-Journal’s Abigail Brashear, 46,000 acres of seagrass have disappeared throughout the lagoon system. That’s 58 percent of the seagrass that was in the lagoon in 2009.

And manatees are dying. Dying, with nothing in their stomachs, because there is nothing for them to eat. In December, January and February, more than 400 manatees died. By comparison, 405 died in all of 2015.

The seagrass dies and the manatees die, along with the crabs, the fish, the shrimp that die or are never born. The birds that would have eaten them. The ripples of death spread ever outward. At some point, it will be the lagoon itself that dies.

At some point. What point is that?

We don’t know.

What’s happening in the lagoon came as a surprise to even the most experienced scientists - people like Pat Rose, the biologist who’s run Save the Manatee for decades and is considered one of the world’s top experts on manatees and their environments. Rose is among those who have been talking for years of dire consequences if people don’t stop the flow of fertilizer from green lawns, sticky oil residue from roads and human waste seeping from failing septic tanks and into the lagoon. So he knew this was coming. Just not this soon. “A year ago,” he told us, “I never would have believed that we’d see what we’re seeing now.”

A BRIEF REPRIEVE FOR THE MANATEES

He expects things will get better soon. The water is warming up. Manatees can spread out to areas where the seagrass beds are still in decent shape. For now, people who see manatees that seem hurt, distressed or sick should not try to feed them. (Instead, report them to the state hotline at 1-888-404-3922 - they’ll be rescued and taken to facilities like the Jacksonville Zoo to recover.) Through Save the Manatee, they can donate to the coalition of state agencies and nonprofits that work together to rescue manatees and document their deaths.

And Floridians can advocate. They can protest attempts to downgrade the manatee from threatened status. They can push for better cleanup of the water that goes into the lagoon. There will be links with this editorial on the opinion page of our website at www.news-journalonline.com.

But they’d better do it soon. That’s the last hidden message in that photograph. Time is running out, faster than expected.

Online: https://www.news-journalonline.com

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March 4

The Miami Herald on spring break travelers flouting COVID rules:

Florida has sent a message to the rest of the country: We’re open for business.

People experiencing COVID fatigue in states with stricter lockdowns, and colder weather, are listening. Flights and hotel rooms are cheap. Out-of-state visitors are flocking to South Florida during Spring Break where they can let their hair down - and, unfortunately, their masks.

“The fact that their hometowns are too cold, or not as open as Florida, has made us the destination of choice,” Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber said in a “COVID-19 Update” video posted online by the city.

It’s not just the drunken brawls, traffic and college students gone wild that Miami Beach and other destinations will have to contend with. Gov. DeSantis has done his best to depict Florida as the place where COVID magically doesn’t exist. Gelber, who expects more visitors than last year, told the Herald Editorial Board that he thinks it’s not just college students seeking refuge in South Florida, but also older people.

Combine that influx with Florida’s near absence of coronavirus restrictions; add the more contagious U.K. and Brazilian variants that have been found in Miami-Dade County, then mix in Spring Breakers’ “anything goes” attitude - we know, this attitude has no age limit - and we risk losing progress made since the post-holiday peak of cases and deaths.

Miami-Dade is about three-quarters of the way down from that peak. But with test positivity rates hovering between 5.7 percent and 6 percent, we’re still a long way from the low numbers we saw in the fall, when that rate got as low as 3 percent to 4 percent, Dr. Mary Jo Trepka, chair of FIU’s Department of Epidemiology, told the Editorial Board.

“Spring Break will fuel transmission in our community and it will probably fuel transmission in communities where (visitors) come from,” Trepka said.

It’s hard to tell exactly how much worse COVID numbers could get in Miami-Dade. We can’t use last year as a comparison because Spring Break happened early in the pandemic when there wasn’t enough testing, Trepka said. Holidays like Memorial Day, for example, have been tied to coronavirus surges in many parts of the country, but Spring Break is contained to specific geographical areas, so a comparison there wouldn’t be precise, either.

But we have learned there’s little good that comes from packed bars and restaurants during a pandemic.

DeSantis boasted about leaving Florida open in his annual State of the State address on March 2. That has helped businesses recover, but DeSantis has done so while tying the hands of local governments and prohibiting them from enforcing mask mandates and other restrictions. He now wants the Legislature to prohibit local emergency measures such as curfews. This is unspeakably cruel.

Miami Beach has approved a slew of measures to ensure visitors are following COVID-19 safety guidelines and to combat the Spring Break debauchery and criminal activity that Gelber said has become worse over the past decade. The city’s seven-week plan increases policing and code enforcement, limits parking and protects residential neighborhoods. The city is also distributing masks and has launched a social-media campaign targeting college-age visitors with the slogan “Vacation Responsibly.”

“Vacation Responsibly” and Spring Break sound like oxymorons. But we hope the slogan works. Miami-Dade needs careless large crowds like another case of COVID.

Online: https://www.miamiherald.com