Nate Monroe: Ron DeSantis wants a cookie, but Florida's COVID credit due elsewhere

COMMENTARY | Give Gov. Ron DeSantis some credit.

Lockdowns (except for breweries and bars) don't work (although they probably did in Florida, where virtually  every  populated area was, in fact, locked down or subject to measures like mask mandates DeSantis despises).

Florida doesn't need a bailout (ignore the $2.7 billion budget deficit) because it's the land of opportunity (excuse the broken unemployment system) where New Yorkers and Californians are clamoring to get in (if you don't count the roughly same number of people who are leaving). 

Re-opening schools (which employ those freedom-sapping measures DeSantis reviles, like masks, plexiglass, quarantining, and shutdowns) went swimmingly (minus a few dead teachers).

More:Nate Monroe: Ron DeSantis, the story of a useless 'TiT'

Cases:Duval County reports 10 COVID-19 deaths; 99 across Florida

Florida, above all, values its students (we do apologize for the aging Boomhauers in the state Legislature who are trying to restrict Florida's immensely popular college scholarship program). 

Florida outperformed its peers (with the small exception of California, which has a lower death rate), and especially New York City (though Miami has often been a close second). Florida is invincible (and also the mass incubator of the more transmissible British COVID-19 variant).

Vaccinations are going according to plan (just don't ask for the actual plan). And although demand is softening (see the vast, empty vaccination sites across the state), Florida has done extensive outreach into minority communities (just don't expect any data).

Florida's leaders are laser-focused on lifting its populace out of the dregs of the pandemic economy (and on cracking down on fictitious violent protests, restricting voting, stripping cities of the right to decide their own budgets, critical race theory, and allowing lobbyists to write laws that make it harder to protect the environment).   

CREDIT FOR WHAT? Florida's pandemic horrors?

Florida has, by the most generous accounting, just barely lurched through to the (hopeful) end of the pandemic under the leadership of Ron DeSantis — neither a particular success story nor the epitome of failure. Just average devastation.

A more realistic assessment is to recognize Florida for the horror show that it is: Almost 2 million cases and more than 32,000 dead. Businesses closed, people brought to the brink, with little help from a state unemployment system that was designed to fail. As ever, in this state of cosmic divides in wealth and opportunity, a sunny Spring Break Wednesday to some is a somber day of grievance for a neighbor a block away. It was not at all surprising to learn the ultra-wealthy and the politically connected got the vaccine hook-up when the rest of us would have crawled over broken glass for a shot. 

Is Florida marginally more of a horror show than California? Is it good DeSantis isn't the lecherous jackal who governs New York?

Who truly cares?

We happen to live in Florida, not New York or California, but Florida, where 32,000 people died and the governor — DeSantis — isn't often bothered to acknowledge it. “We see people dying—it sucks...," he declared months ago. Florida is devoid of empathetic leaders in power and is stuck instead with ghoulish carnival barkers cut straight from a Stephen King nightmare: Come on in, the water's fine.

So of course, with the notable exclusion of mass death and sickness, DeSantis and a cottage industry of right-wing cranks seem to think he deserves more credit. But for what, exactly?

DeSantis' two foundational beliefs seem to be that, 1. COVID-19 isn't that big of a deal unless you're very old and already very sick, and 2. That he should do as little as possible about it.

For example: To someone like DeSantis, who believes COVID-19 is overhyped, why not slow-walk the vaccine rollout? Look at how angry it makes the media!

But he and the rest of us are fortunate others are taking on the burden for him: Blessed be the workers at pharmacies and FEMA sites who, disturbed by the obviously softening demand and wasted doses, are taking it upon themselves to quietly inoculate as many people as possible — often in violation of the state's orders. They deserve the credit.

DeSantis issued no mask mandate. This was a politically tenuous issue for DeSantis, who is hoping to run for president one day and is courting a peculiar, conspiracy-adjacent base that is hostile toward science and plain common sense. So local officials — of both parties — had to step in and do that for him, issuing orders that affected the vast majority of Florida's population and almost certainly helped to curb the spread of the virus.

When Florida schools closed, DeSantis quickly pushed for them to re-open. It must be said: Florida got lucky. Schools haven't turned out to be the petri dishes experts initially feared they might be (thanks at least in part to those mitigation measures school leaders put in place that DeSantis despises).

DeSantis didn't know this at the time. No one did. It's a good thing that turned out to be the case regardless. But it was also local school officials who had to carry out this task — not DeSantis nor his political appointees, who snarked on Fox News while teachers and administrators scrambled to ready schools with little help or guidance from the state. And it was those teachers and administrators who paid the price, not DeSantis.

Florida's COVID-19 saga is a story about local officials and regular people working in the absence of any guidance or common sense from the state, who sometimes had to make decisions, like mask mandates, that were politically or practically difficult. To the extent there were any successes in Florida, they belong to locals. Or to plain dumb luck.

Nate Monroe's City column appears every Thursday and Sunday.