The Miami-Dade Mayor is doing something Florida’s governor won’t do. He’s saying enough is enough and doing his part to stop the spread of coronavirus.
The Miami Herald reports on Sunday:
Miami-Dade County reported 1,981 additional confirmed cases of COVID-19 and eight new deaths. The county now has 48,992 confirmed cases and 1,051 deaths, the highest in the state.
A statement from the Mayor read:
We are still tracking the spike in the number of cases involving 18- to 34-year-olds that began in mid-June, which the County’s medical experts say was caused by a number of factors, including young people going to congested places — indoors and outside — without taking precautions such as wearing masks and practicing social distancing. Contributing to the positives in that age group, the doctors have told me, were graduation parties, gatherings at restaurants that turned into packed parties in violation of the rules and street protests where people could not maintain social distancing and where not everyone was wearing facial coverings.
While masks are mandated in Miami-Dade county and most of the surrounding areas, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is not requiring them statewide. During a briefing Monday, Desantis also took a page out of Donald Trump’s playbook and blamed the spike in cases on more testing saying, “As you see cases, people should just put it into context about what’s going on. There’s no need to really be fearful about it”
“Some of these things we’ve seen over the last eight days, I know the media says, oh, this, record case. It’s basically been the same… I mean, yeah, when we do 85,000 tests, we’re gonna have more. We’re doing 40,000 tests, we’re gonna have less positives. But the percentage has been pretty consistent.”
The state’s agricultural commissioner Nikki Fried says DeSantis has been “taking his cues right from the President. Until the time at which the president starts to wear a mask and starts to show some concern about the expansion of the pandemic across our entire state, we aren’t going to see it here in the state of Florida.”