Ron DeSantis Would Be the Coutry's Laughingstock if His State Wasn't So Deadly

Laughably, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said this week that  President Biden should follow his state’s lead, even as Florida experiences record-breaking cases, deaths and hospitalizations.  In a Wednesday interview, DeSantis unsuccessfully defended his COVID response, saying Florida is seeing “great success” in treating COVID patients with monoclonal antibodies,

Meanwhile, reality prevails.  Florida recorded 901 COVID-19 deaths on Thursday, the single highest single-day increase in deaths in the state since the pandemic began, according to the Miami Herald's calculation of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data.  Florida is experiencing its  worst surge in COVID-19 cases EVER, with the state recording more than 150,000 cases in the past week, according to Johns Hopkins University (JHU) data.  More than 26,000 new cases were reported Wednesday, a one-day record.

As the death toll from COVID-19 increases, morgues are struggling to keep pace, with AdventHealth - a non-profit healthcare system in central Florida - renting refrigerators to store dead bodies.  Hospitals are also close to a breaking point in the state. Around 95% of Intensive Care Unit beds are in use across 262 hospitals, with 55.3% taken up by COVID-19 patients, according to data from the Department of Health and Human Services. On Monday, 75 doctors walked out on their jobs to protest against a surge in unvaccinated COVID-19 patients.

The state has struggled to manage the more contagious and deadly Delta variant, as Ron "DeathSentence" has for weeks resisted mask and vaccine mandates.  On July 31, DeSantis issued an executive order banning schools from imposing mask mandates, and threatened to withdraw funding if they do. Many school districts, however, have defied DeSantis' ban.

The state has recorded at least three million COVID-19 cases and more than 42,000 deaths since the pandemic began, according to JHU.