While at the White House on Tuesday, sitting alongside President Donald Trump, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida ripped into the media for their failing, dire predictions of his novel coronavirus response.
Gov. DeSantis was lambasted in the media for weeks for refusing to implement a draconian statewide lockdown, though Florida is outperforming states across the nation when it comes to slowing the spread of the China-originated virus.
Asked about criticism that he’s face for not implementing a full shutdown early on, DeSantis let the media have it. “What have the results been?” he rhetorically asked, according to Fox News. “You look at some of the most draconian orders that have been issued in some of these states and compare Florida in terms of our hospitalizations per 100,000, in terms of our fatalities per 100,000.”
“I mean, you go from D.C., Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, you name it. Florida has done better,” the Republican continued.
“And that has not happened because we understood we have a big, diverse state, we understood the outbreak was not uniform throughout the state, and we had a tailored and measured approach that not only helped our numbers be way below what anyone predicted, but also did less damage to our state going forward,” explained DeSantis.
“We’ve had people in the hospital, but I am now in a situation where I have less than 500 people at a state of 22 million on ventilators as of last night,” he added. “And I have 6,500 ventilators that are sitting idle, unused throughout the state of Florida.”
Captioning the video clip of his forceful explanation to the media, DeSantis wrote Wednesday: “Florida has done better than anyone predicted. We have a big, diverse state that requires a tailored and measured approach. Data and science have helped us flatten the curve in a safe way.”
As noted by The Daily Wire last week, DeSantis similarly explained on Fox News that Florida has slowed the spread of COVID-19 while causing minimal economic and social damage to the state by tailoring their response.
“People were predicting us to be worse than New York, like another Italy,” the governor told Fox News host Sean Hannity. “They said that this week, one of the newspapers in Florida said we would have 464,000 people hospitalized. The actual number is 2,200. So we beat that by 462,000. But what we did very early was focus on the populations who are most at risk – our senior citizens, and particularly our nursing homes and assisted living facilities.”
“We instituted screening for all staff immediately, we stopped visitation, we required all staff to wear N95 masks,” DeSantis explained. “I charged the National Guard with doing strike teams and spot testing at the facility to try to figure out if any of the staff are asymptomatic. Whenever there was an incident at a nursing home, we send these quick response teams to go and try to limit some infections … We’ve put out almost six million masks just to our nursing homes and assisted living facilities and so we understood the risk that this posed to the senior population.”
WATCH:
Florida has done better than anyone predicted. We have a big, diverse state that requires a tailored and measured approach. Data and science have helped us flatten the curve in a safe way. pic.twitter.com/x3VGLGjlE4
— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) April 29, 2020
Related: Governor Ron DeSantis Explains How The State Went From High Risk To Flattening The Curve
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