Y’all, I’m so tired of writing about the damn coronavirus. Health care and medicine are really not areas I’m interested in. I’ve been writing about sports since mid-2006 consistently with only two separate six-month breaks. That’s what I’m interested in. That’s what I want to write about.
But sports is a coronavirus story, and the coronavirus is a sports story. So here we are again.
It makes my heart sick to see the rising numbers in Florida. I spent the first almost 22 years of my life there before my first job out of college took me away and my wife’s US Navy career kept me away. The latter may bring us to the naval station in Jacksonville some day. I hope it does. Nearly every member of my family, my wife’s family, and my brother’s wife’s family lives in the state. The roots run deep. I will always be a Florida Man wherever it is we go from here.
I currently live in Rhode Island. It’s one of the states in the best shape with a falling case load. The positive test percentage has been below 3% for a while and has begun dipping below 2% on occasion. The governor used to have daily press conferences; she’s down to three a week and the department of health doesn’t bother releasing new data on weekend days anymore because it’s no longer critical to do so.
But Little Rhoady (yes, that’s a real nickname for this place) has actually had a pretty bad time of it. As of yesterday, the state was fourth in cases per capita and fifth in deaths per capita from the virus.
The governor has received some acclaim, and perhaps rightly so, for the way things have gotten under control. She let things get a bit out of control first, though, as she was the slowest in the northeast to close schools and day cares among other things. The virus ripped through unprepared nursing homes in the Providence area, and to date just under 80% of the deaths in the state have come from nursing homes and assisted living facilities.
Maybe some of this was inevitable. The per capita case count for Rhode Island is nearly identical to that of Massachusetts, the big neighbor to the north. If your New England geographic knowledge is as fuzzy as mine was before living here, Rhode Island is firmly in the orbit of Boston. It’s a Patriots and Red Sox state, and many people cross the border one way or the other for work. It’s several hours away from New York City, so spillover effects would be from Mass (as everyone here calls it) and not the NYC outbreak.
Not all of it was inevitable, though. There was more the state could’ve done sooner that seemed obvious to me at the time, but the governor dragged her feet back then. Her high marks for managing the crisis are offset to a degree by her being slow to act in March.
I hate that I’m seeing the same story play out in Florida, only worse. The response from the governor’s office has been inadequate. Things are getting worse in nursing homes. And it’s still so early on the upward curve that projections are spotty at best.
But once the curve goes up in the way it has been in Florida over the last week, it takes a long time to get it back down. Rhode Island took about two and a half months to get back to regular daily case counts below 100, from early April to mid-June. For other states that have things reasonably under control now, 2.5 to 3 months is a pretty consistent time frame. If Florida follows the same pattern, it won’t be until early-to-mid September that daily case counts will be back to where they were two weeks ago.
UF has not had any cases in its reopened athletics department, and thank God for that. Now’s not the time to spike the football on that fact, though. It’d be like spiking it because you crossed your own 10-yard-line. The goal line is a very, very long way from here, and it will get harder to maintain if students from all over return to campus.
Florida at least has a robust testing regime in place. It is on average testing more than 1% of the state’s population per week, though as the current trajectory shows, it takes more than testing alone to suppress the virus. And for now, the death rate is staying lower. The death rate apparently lags the case rate by about 28 days, so it’s too early to see those effects yet. With the average age of infection trending lower across the country, hopefully the death rate will stay lower. The larger population of elderly in Florida makes things potentially more dangerous there, however.
Masks really do work. Compliance has been high and rising in all of the northeast, not just Rhode Island, and the estimated virus reproduction rate is relatively low throughout the region. It was a hard-won lesson, but people up here learned it. Masks, plus diligent social distancing and symptomatic people staying home, are I think the biggest factors in the subsiding of the virus up here.
I’ve come to the opinion that elected leaders are most important for messaging and informing more so than imposing limits on activity. In every state, economic activity, movement, and the virus reproduction rate all plummeted before restrictions and shelter-in-place orders went into effect, and they’ve lagged the reopenings in many places too. It’s the people who began to shut things down, not state officials, and it’s the people that have reopened on their own timelines.
So it’ll be up to the people of Florida more than the governor and health department to do the right thing now. Yes, those officials should be conveying more of a sense of urgency, but the citizens need to look at the way the numbers are going exponential now and compare them to the exponential graphs of other states. Hot summer weather isn’t doing a thing to curtail rising case counts in dry Arizona or muggy Florida, so forget seasonal effects. The outside temperature appears to be yet another thing the virus doesn’t care about.
Please, please wear a mask, wash your hands, and stay home as much as you can reasonably do it. I’ve lived through a spike. It’s awful. Florida appears to be starting a spike, and it’s up to everyone in the state to mitigate it.