On Tuesday, Texas posted a record number of COVID-19 cases, totally over 4,500. However, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott declared that better than 1,500 of those cases didn’t count, because they were just cases that hadn’t been tallied before. So the real number was only around 2,900—making it still the highest day for the state so far. Then the next day, Texas hit 3,500, and Abbott blamed the increase on numbers from prisons and nursing homes … as if that makes it just dandy. Florida Republican Ron DeSantis then joined Abbott in a chorus blaming “increased testing” for why their states numbers were going up. Only … that’s not true from two different directions. First, neither Florida nor Texas had higher testing in the last week. Additionally, over an extended period, more testing should help numbers go down, because it allows isolation of the infected and tracing of connected individuals. More testing is how nations like South Korea drove their numbers down to near zero.
But apparently prisons and nursing homes and too much testing weren’t doing it anymore. On Friday, DeSantis added another big category to the list of people whose numbers shouldn’t count. Florida’s rising numbers, said the governor, are due to … migrant workers who are “overwhelmingly Hispanic." These workers, according to DeSantis are “all just packed there like sardines, going across Palm Beach County or some of these other places.” And getting specific, DeSantis provided an example of somewhere these workers could be transmitting the disease—at a watermelon farm.
What’s really going on in Florida can be almost impossible to determine. What with forcing county examiners to hide death records, repeated revisions in reported numbers, and firing the data scientist who created the state’s COVID-19 dashboard, the numbers from Florida seem about as reliable of those coming from Russia or Iran.
Weekend dips add to confusion, but Florida’s average has tripled in the last ten days.
As with most states, Florida’s numbers have dipped with weekends then risen again as local officials catch up, but just in the last ten days, the average daily number of cases has tripled. This is the kind of exponential growth that was seen in the worst hot spots in the early weeks of the epidemic in the United States—the kind of growth that in that first round generated shutdowns and enforced social distancing. But DeSantis has made it clear that none of that is about to happen.
Instead, apparently having run out of days on which he could blame prisoners or old people for inconveniently getting sick, DeSantis just decided to go with a double-ladle of racism and declare that the rise is all because of those watermelon-picking Hispanics. It’s the kind of statement that makes him a Trump favorite. "So no, we're not shutting down, we're going to go forward," said DeSantis.
Abbott, who also spent the morning making it absolutely clear he wasn’t going to allow cities or counties to mandate wearing masks, had more than just new cases to explain. He also had to cover how the last two weeks had seen a doubling of hospitalizations in Texas. However, Abbott insisted that there were still plenty of hospital beds available so there was no reason to take any action.
Texas’ numbers here do not include more than 1,500 cases that belong … somewhere on this chart.
Abbot did not explain how an increase in testing was causing more people to go to the hospital. But he did not mention watermelons. At least, not yet.
