When the coronavirus hit New York City, thousands of residents fled the city. Many of them left for the Hamptons or the West Coast, according to a New York Times analysis of mail-forwarding requests. And hundreds of others traveled down to Florida, toward Miami, Orlando, or Tampa.
This influx of New Yorkers became so overwhelming that, at one point, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis set up highway checkpoints along Florida’s northern highways to screen New York motorists. He ordered New Yorkers who flew into the state to self-quarantine for two weeks or face a 60-day jail sentence.
It’s unclear whether DeSantis’s efforts actually discouraged travel from New York. But it is clear that Florida avoided having New Yorkers bring the COVID-19 crisis with them.
This is not at all what DeSantis’s critics expected, myself included. We anticipated a surge of COVID-19 cases that would spread from Miami to the rest of the state, putting smaller, rural hospitals at risk and endangering the state’s elderly population.
We were wrong. That surge has not yet materialized. Florida’s outbreak has been contained in three of its southern populous counties — Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach — and the rest of the state managed to flatten the curve as soon as it appeared.
There are many reasons Florida’s coronavirus response worked. The most important is that Florida’s citizens adopted a shutdown mentality long before DeSantis issued a statewide shelter-in-place order. By March 15, Floridians’ mobility had declined by more than 50% statewide, and in Miami-Dade and Broward counties, it had declined by more than 80%. Three weeks later, DeSantis shut his state down.
Another factor is Florida’s weather. Many experts believe that the state’s tropical climate helps mitigate the spread of the coronavirus, though no one has definitively linked temperature, humidity, or seasonality to its spread. But it is worth noting that other tropical parts of the world, such as nations south of China, have not experienced serious outbreaks, either.
Giving Florida’s individual counties the freedom to determine which preventative measures were necessary was one of the best decisions DeSantis made. He deferred to local leaders and allowed them to guide the shutdown, and, as of right now, it looks like this targeted approach worked. The state’s total number of COVID-19 cases has steadily declined over the past few weeks, and the average of new deaths has begun to plateau.
Florida isn’t in the clear yet. The state is still way behind in testing — only 2.8% of its total population has been tested so far, according to the Tampa Bay Times, and state officials recently broke with a private lab after discovering that thousands of the tests it had ordered from the lab were unreliable — and its nursing homes are still experiencing a devastating number of deaths. But unlike New York, Florida is headed toward recovery and a gradual reopening in the next few weeks.
This success is remarkable considering just how many New Yorkers traveled to Florida during the coronavirus’s peak. And though it’s still too soon to attribute Florida’s success to a specific policy or decision, Florida’s mitigation worked in spite of a variety of factors that, according to conventional thinking, should have worsened the state’s outbreak. And that alone is reason to rejoice.
