The state of Florida continues to act as a test case for the Republican notion of ignoring a worldwide pandemic into submission. Under the control of Donald Trump devotee and "mayor from Jaws" Gov. Ron DeSantis, the state has seen steadily rising COVID-19 cases after a period of largely ignoring social distancing recommendations urged by infectious disease experts. It took some time for the new cases to translate into a rise in deaths; that, too, has been recently changing.
Another recent change: the state's numbers of COVID-19 cases in children are now soaring, as they have throughout the nation. Nearly 100,000 new COVID-19 cases were confirmed in children nationwide in the last two weeks of July—the period just before most of America begins a new school year. In Florida, the number of cases in children during the last month soared a staggering 137%.
There are now nearly 40,000 children in Florida who have tested positive for the virus, reports CNN, a more than doubling from the less than 17,000 positive cases in early July. Hospitalizations of Florida children almost exactly doubled, as well. While Donald Trump and other, like-minded politicians have dismissed soaring pandemic numbers as the result of more testing, hospitalization rates are more difficult to ignore; children are not ending up hospitalized with COVID-19 infections as a result of "more tests."
Deaths, which lag behind hospitalizations as hospitalizations lag behind positive test rates, also roughly doubled during the same period for Florida's children—from 4 to 7.
None of this, in Florida or elsewhere, seems as of yet to have forced Trump-loyal governors to rethink their plans of ignoring COVID-19 into submission in their states' school systems just as they did in prior rounds of thoughts-and-prayers pandemic management.
We know exactly how that will turn out, because science: crowded indoor environments where social distancing is impossible will result in rapid virus spread, resulting in individual school re-closures only after students have gotten sick and exposed many others, resulting in increased hospitalizations and deaths.