Category — Florida

That’s according to Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor.

According to Rebekah Jones’s site Florida COVID Action: today the Florida Department of Health is reporting that Florida had:

• 11,433 new cases today
• 65,837 new cases this week
• 244,151 cases since March 1^st
• 93 new deaths today
• 4203 deaths since March 1^st

So we shouldn’t be concerned that more than a quarter of all cases occurred this week? Florida is the location of a sixth of the daily count of new COVID cases for the entire US, but we shouldn’t worry 😈

There are a lot of out of state plates on the local roads, which means that cases are probably being exported to other states. This is a good thing because Florida only has 918 available ICU beds, that’s Key West to Pensacola less than a thousand beds.

In my county we have gone from 5 COVID-19 deaths to 9 in two weeks. We are down to 5 ICU beds available, 4 of which are in the north county. We were at 200 cases for months and now we are approaching 1,000.

Yesterday CNN reported:

At least 56 intensive care units in Florida hospitals reached capacity on Tuesday, state officials said. Another 35 hospitals show ICU bed availability of 10% or less, according to the Agency for Health Care Administration in that state.

Trump’s Tulsa rally, protests ‘likely’ contributed to a surge in coronavirus cases, local health official says. He wants to do the same thing for New Hampshire, as we wait for the results of his Arizona rally.

We are running out of PPE again as the number of cases increase and he wants to open schools. He doesn’t know what he’s doing and has failed to provide any leadership.

In what can be considered ‘good’ news, the mayor of Houston has just told the Texas Republican Party that their convention at a Houston facility can’t be held under current circumstances. What is Trump going to do when a place he wants to hold a rally tells him they don’t have the medical facilities to support a Presidential visit?

(Gilda Radner as Roseanne Roseannadanna)

The Fates decided that a pandemic, riots, Trump DeSantis & Gaetz representing me, and pollen aren’t enough as the Hurricane season begins, I now have honeybees infesting a wall in the cats’ house. In an amazing burst of sanity at some point Florida protects them as an endangered species so you have to get a beekeeper to remove them.

Beekeepers are apparently as secretive as the Knights Templar as they don’t believe in the Internet in Northwest Florida. You have to play telephone tag for a day or so before you find someone who will give you a name, and then you can find them using a name search. Keyword searches don’t work when all of the mentions of bees are in graphics.

If I didn’t have tenants with bee allergies I would ignore the bees. They are between the inner and outer walls, not in cat space and are pollinating whatever the Asian restaurant across the street is growing in their backyard.

I have been watching the games being played with the data on the COVID-19 pandemic for weeks all of which are dodgy. The Florida health department decided early on that the only cases that would be reported would be those involving Florida residents. If you were visiting from outside Florida and got sick or died of COVID-19, Florida didn’t want it reported. To control that they ordered county medical examiners to stop publishing local death statistics, something that was common practice, because the MEs reported all deaths, including tourists. Journalists noticed the difference in the number of people in the reports and started asking questions.

Then the health department noticed that their web site was making “too much information” available to the media and researchers. The solution: fire Rebekah Jones, the data manager for the site because she objected to manually deleting data from the site.

The BBC has a long article on the handling of pandemic in the US – Coronavirus: From ‘We’ve shut it down’ to 100,000 US dead

On a lighter note you should check out Sarah Cooper on Twitter. She is a comedienne whose lip syncs of Trump are really worth your time. She does pantomime with a Trump sound track. To understand you have to see her in action. How to Medical is my personal favorite.

On last Friday an F-22 worth ≅$140 million dropped out of the sky over an Eglin AFB range, and last night an F-35A worth ≅$90 million did the same thing. The pilots ejected successfully. COVID-19 isn’t enough to worry about, now we have tons of flaming metal raining from above.

Florida attorney Daniel Uhlfelder, dressed as the Grim Reaper, walks on a newly opened beach near Destin, Florida, on Friday, May 1. He believes Florida beaches are opening too soon, and this is his macabre plea for beachgoers to stay home. (Devon Ravine/USA Today/Reuters)

The only problem with this sign for social distancing is that this is prom time for gators and the bull gators should be kept a good further away than 6 feet, but a nice try on behalf of Leon County.

Republicans wonder why they are losing the senior vote:

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) referred to his state as a “waiting room” for seniors who will soon die.

The Florida governor made the remarks at a coronavirus briefing on Sunday after noting that some nursing home patients had been infected by asymptomatic COVID-19 carriers.

“Florida is ground zero for the nursing home, we’re God’s waiting room,” he explained. “We have a huge number of facilities, a huge number of residents.”

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis discussed reopening Florida with Trump because he didn’t want to be thrown under the same bus as Brian Kemp of Georgia for reopening without getting the permission of Don Donald.

DeSantis has started to make moves but he isn’t including South Florida in those changes as that’s where the majority of cases are found.

The Florida Department of Health doesn’t count non-residents in its reporting. This means it is undercounting the cases in Florida health facilities and the number of deaths that occur in the state.

As if the CNN article, Florida’s governor keeps hitting new lows in the battle against coronavirus, wasn’t bad enough, Ron DeSantis has shown up on the BBC: World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) has resumed airing live matches after being deemed an “essential service” in Florida.

Ron DeSantis assumes he is Florida’s governor because Trump endorsed him after DeSantis sucked up to an extent that caused extreme gastrointestinal distress. The ad DeSantis ran with his young children should have caused a visit from the Families & Children abuse investigators. The other relevant information that you need to understand this mess is that the McMahon family, who own the WWE, are friends with Trump. Trump chose Linda McMahon to head the Small Business Administration. DeSantis did it because he believes (or knows) that Trump likes the idea.

Florida finally went into state-wide lock down, but Ron DeSantis,[plays Florida’s governor on TV] left the resolution of two cruise ships wanting to land passengers to Broward County because Ron might make a decision that Trump wouldn’t like. Broward County officials noted that they weren’t really set up to talk to representatives of foreign countries but someone had to do it as the State Department, Federal government, and state government refused. In the time of Trump local elections are more important than normal.

If you want even more proof of Trump’s failure read the BBC’s Covid-19: What makes a good leader during a crisis?.

This ad puts Trump’s incompetence on display with his own words. That’s why his campaign lawyers are threatening to sue anyone who airs it.

Military laboratories are ready to process COVID-19 tests, but the process to send them samples has not been created. The military is capable of all kinds of things not related to blowing things up, but they need an established chain of command and a process for working with civilian organizations.

Coronavirus: Toilet roll alternatives blocking sewers. The people hoarding toilet paper should be tracked down and sentenced to clearing sewers of the alternatives that people have been using after they run out.

Via Comrade Misfit, a site with graphic COVID-19 Projections nation-wide and by states.

The final word.

As usual there was no one else voting when I went at 10AM. Two precincts use the town hall for voting, but I have never seen a crowd.

They had hand sanitizer all around, but no gloves or masks.

Tomorrow, March 17, is the Florida primary election. if you are registered to vote, do it.

Vote.org can tell you the status of your registration and where your polling place is located. If you run into problems call the Election Protection Hotline at 1-866-687-8683.

There are a lot of people who don’t want you to vote if you are not a well-to-do white male Protestant. It has taken almost two hundred years to force them back into their caves for the most part, but they come shuffling out every so often to annoy people and we have to remind they aren’t in charge any more.

Even the primaries are important. In some instances the primaries are the only election that count. Voting in every election makes it harder for you to be removed from the rolls.

See Matt Gaetz make a fool of himself. It’s not just the mask, check out his shoes. You don’t see those outside of film noir (or possibly Roger Stone).

So, this week I was planning all out war on some German cockroaches that just couldn’t take a hint. I had a gas attack (foggers), land mines (diatomaceous earth around the perimeter of the building), and then booby traps (roach motels) all over the terrain. Alas, the war had to be postponed to switch out an antique electric water heater.

The big box stores only carry the fastest selling version of anything in stock, so there was no way they had a 30 gallon ‘lowboy’ electric heater. I had to get a 40 gallon which presented some interesting gyrations getting the new one into the bathroom. That 33% increase in size barely made it through the door and we had to lay it down to get beyond the sink. (Truman was the President when these apartments were built. We are talking 400 square feet. Sinks hung on the wall, not vanities.)

The roaches got a temporary respite, but the fight continues.

This occurred in the county to my west. I dealt with some pretty dumb people when working in upstate New York, but no one this dumb. ‘Florida man’ strikes again.