Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis vowed to keep his state open despite a rise in coronavirus cases.
“Today we are back down to 4,500 [cases] and a 7.3% positivity rate,” a spokesperson for DeSantis told CBS12 News. “We believe yesterday’s high number was due to a large submission file and skewed the numbers for that day.”
“The governor will not lockdown and hurt families who can’t afford to shelter in place for 6 weeks. Especially not for a virus that has a 99.8% survival rate. One area of concern is Assisted Living Facilities. Since those over 70 face the greatest threat from [COVID-19] the Governor is monitoring those numbers daily and is prepared to move therapeutic and prophylactic assets to those facilities as needed,” the spokesperson continued.
The statement comes after one of Joe Biden’s coronavirus advisers, Dr. Michael Osterholm, said the United States might have to implement a lockdown for four to six weeks to combat the spread.
“We have a big pool of money out there that we could borrow, at historic low interest rates by the federal government. We could pay for a package right now to cover all of the lost wages for individual workers, losses to small companies and medium-sized companies, for cities, states, county governments,” Osterholm said.
“If we did that, then we could lock down for four to six weeks, and if we did that, we could drive the numbers down, like they did in Asia, like they did in New Zealand and Australia,” he said.
Another Biden coronavirus adviser, Dr. Vivek Murthy, said that a national lockdown would be “a measure of last resort.”
“In the spring, we didn’t know a lot about COVID, we responded, in a sense, with an on-off switch. We just shut things down because we didn’t know exactly how this was spreading and where it was spreading, but we learned a lot more since then,” Murthy said.
Meanwhile, Biden has called for states to impose mask mandates in line with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance to help stem the spread of the virus, which has sparked the ire of some Republicans.
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem and Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky have both pushed back on the plan, questioning the need for masks.
“I’m going to do everything I can to try to prevent Biden from locking us up and locking us down and forcing us to wear masks forever,” Paul told New York’s WABC-AM 770 on Sunday. “We can’t go on like this forever.”
