The slow-rolling disaster that is Florida continues apace, with Orange County, home to the Orlando area, reporting a massive 15.1% positive rate on coronavirus tests on Thursday, and the state leading the nation in raw new cases totals as of Friday. Being a true Trump Republican, state Gov. Ron DeSantis is abdicating all responsibility and blaming brown people for those numbers. He says it is the "overwhelmingly Hispanic" day laborers and agricultural workers who are causing the spike.
"Some of these guys go to work in a school bus, and they are all just packed there like sardines, going across Palm Beach County or some of these other places, and there's all these opportunities to have transmission," DeSantis said this week. His agriculture commissioner, Nikki Fried, disagreed, pointing out that most new cases accounting for the spike are in non-agricultural parts of the state. What's more, most of the farmworkers have already left the state, moving north to follow the harvest. But what's particularly galling about DeSantis' finger-pointing is that the failure to keep this community safe lands solidly on him.
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Back in April, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a Florida group fighting for farmworker rights, raised the alarm. "[I]if something isn’t done—now—to address their unique vulnerability, the men and women who plant, cultivate and harvest our food will face a decimating wave of contagion and misery in a matter of weeks, if not days," co-founder Greg Asbed wrote in a New York Times op-ed. The state didn't even start testing farmworker communities until May. That's after a coalition of 50 groups pleaded with DeSantis for assistance.
"We sent this letter to the governor more than two months ago and now he is realizing that foreign workers are more suitable to get infected," Antonio Tovar, executive director of the Farmworker Association of Florida said Wednesday. "That is very shameful because he was advised, he was told when we sent the letter." Many in the farming community were already ill, he said, when testing and assistance finally started reaching them. "It is too little too late," he said. "It was about two weeks ago when the department (of health) sent an email to a lot of organizations saying, 'Hey! We received 2 million face masks. If you want we can give you face masks.'"
How big of a failure was DeSantis? The international medical humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), which works largely in underdeveloped and war-torn areas, saw the need and moved in. On May 18, it announced it was in Immokalee to help with testing and medical clinics. "Immokalee is a community where as many as 15,000 to 20,000 migrant farmworkers continue to provide essential labor during this pandemic despite having a high risk of contracting COVID-19 due to crowded living conditions and limited ability to prevent infection during the course of their work," said Dr. Adi Nadimpalli, the MSF project coordinator in Florida. "We wanted to ensure that these workers received COVID-19 health education and testing before they started to migrate north at the end of the southern Florida farming season," said Nadimpalli. “If we don’t reach them now, it may be much more difficult to ensure their safety."
MSF handed off its mobile clinics to the state at the end of May, with the harvest winding down in the state and many of the farmworkers having moved on. The state is well aware that any spike in numbers can't be blamed on these workers, and state officials aren't shy about speaking up. Franco Ripple, a spokesman for the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, issued a statement reiterating that the rise in new cases in the past 10 or so days has not been in agricultural areas, and saying that "naming rural and farm communities as a main driver is not accurate. […] The governor is cherry-picking data in an attempt to blame farmworkers and agriculture for the spread of COVID-19, by highlighting a small sample size from one farm."
DeSantis hasn't gotten the memo, or refuses to read it. His statements are going to make it even harder for health officials to work with the permanent farm labor communities in the state, whose workers are still considered essential—and as vulnerable as ever as COVID resurges in the state.