Gov. DeSantis may be a little too clever for his own good

Note from Tom: FeedBurner, which has been sending out the emails with my blog posts, will stop doing this in July. I have engaged Follow.It to take over that immediately. If you are currently receiving the FeedBurner emails, your address has been transferred to Follow It. And if you’re not receiving emails now, you can remedy that problem by clicking on the menu icon in the top left of this post.

I’m going to leave the FeedBurner feed active for a few more days, so you should receive both feeds of this post. If you received the FeedBurner feed for this post but you didn’t also receive the Follow.It feed (you can identify that from the email address it comes from), please drop me an email and I’ll add you to Follow.It. In theory, this shouldn’t happen, but one never knows…

I’m sorry that it’s been two weeks since I’ve posted – got too busy in my day job. Fortunately, the numbers didn’t wait for me to write a post, and they’ve kept declining all along. The last time we had “only” 300 deaths from Covid per day was at the end of last March. As you may know, we were at around 4,000 deaths a day less than six months ago.

Florida Gov. DeSantis has been in a precarious political battle with the cruise industry lately. Some cruises were set to leave from Florida soon, but the CDC had refused to allow this to happen. A federal judge just ruled that the cruises can proceed, while a state lawsuit against the CDC proceeds in court.

But looming over this is that DeSantis recently got a law passed that forbids businesses from requiring vaccinations for their customers. The cruise lines were planning on requiring vaccinations, but now they can’t do that.

So the cruises will proceed, and the people on board won’t be guaranteed to be vaccinated. Will there even be customers for these cruises? Evidently so – otherwise, they wouldn’t be scheduled in the first place.

But the big question is whether any of these cruises will turn into superspreader – or even moderate spreader – events. If that happens (and a cruise that was attempted earlier this year turned into a superspreader disaster), then this will set back the restarting of cruises by many more months. And it might make DeSantis look like a political loser – whereas now he’s considered the most likely GOP presidential nominee if Trump doesn’t run in 2024.

The numbers

These numbers were updated based on those reported on the Worldometers.info site for Sunday, June 6.

Month	Deaths reported during month	Avg. deaths per day during period	Deaths as percentage of previous month’s
Month of March 2020	4,058	131
Month of April	59,812	1,994	1,474%
Month of May	42,327	1,365	71%
Month of June	23,925	798	57%
Month of July	26,649	860	111%
Month of August	30,970	999	116%
Month of Sept.	22,809	760	75%
Month of Oct.	24,332	785	107%
Month of Nov.	38,293	1,276	157%
Month of Dec.	79,850	2,576	209%
Total 2020	354,215	1,154
Month of Jan. 2021	98,064	3,163	123%
Month of Feb.	68,918	2,461	70%
Month of March	72,693	2,345	105%
Month of April	47,593	1,598	66%
Month of May	43,339	1,445	90%
Total Pandemic so far	617,250	1,294

 

I. Total deaths (as of Sunday)

Average deaths last seven days: 300

Percent increase in total deaths in the last seven days: 0.2%

II. Total reported cases (as of Sunday)

Total US reported cases as of Sunday: 34,410,532

Increase in reported cases last 7 days: 82,754 (= 11,822/day)

Percent increase in reported cases in the last seven days: 0.3%  

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com.