This recent article in the Wall Street Journal rightly labels Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis as “vindicated” for his no-lockdown response to COVID-19:
But cases spiked across the Sun Belt, including in California, which maintained much stricter business restrictions. Still, political pressure intensified on Mr. DeSantis to shut down his state again. He refused. “I’m like, ‘No, we’re not going to lock down. It doesn’t work. It compounds problems,’ ” he says. The virus is not “going to be governed by simply closing someone’s business, or not letting people go to work.”
Mr. DeSantis says he listened to a different cast of experts such as Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya, Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff and Oxford’s Carl Heneghan and Sunetra Gupta. Instead of shutting down businesses in the summer, he ordered more-frequent testing for nursing-home workers and deployed more personnel to hard-hit hospitals. In late July, cases in Florida and across the Sun Belt began to fall.
In September Mr. DeSantis lifted capacity restrictions on restaurants and bars. He also overrode local jurisdictions that tried to keep them closed. “We said every business has the right to operate; you cannot close anything. Everyone has the right to work. You have to let people earn a living,” he says. Mr. DeSantis also required local school districts to offer in-person instruction five days a week in the fall, though parents could choose remote learning instead. “The union sued us, but we beat them in court.”
The true test of character is doing what you know is right even when the entire world is against you. DeSantis passed with flying colors.
