Great interview of Florida's @GovRonDeSantis by @RichLowry of how @RonDeSantisFL focused on the elderly, prevented hospitals from discharging actively infected patients into nursing homes, while reopening elsewhere. Even The Villages turned out fine! nationalreview.com/2020/05/corona…
@GovRonDeSantis @RichLowry @RonDeSantisFL So many great insights in the @RichLowry piece. DeSantis’s team actually prioritized sending PPE to nursing homes over sending PPE to hospitals, recognizing that nursing homes were seeding the outbreak that would lead to hospitalizations.
Another piece: Florida’s experience with natural disasters meant that it had a lot of reporting/data infrastructure in place already, including daily reports from nursing homes, assisted living facilities, and hospitals.
The highly granular reporting meant that @GovRonDeSantis had insights early on into where to focus Florida’s efforts (i.e. nursing homes), contrary to those who superficially looked at national or all-age COVID statistics.
Mary Mayhew, DeSantis’ health agency director, used classical test-trace-isolate techniques to make sure that outbreaks were contained, deploying 50 4-person teams of National Guardsmen throughout the state with health department employees to test nursing home staff & residents.
It is worth mentioning that there is some controversy regarding the firing of Rebekah Jones, a data manager at the Florida Department of Health. She says she was fired for refusing to massaging data; DeSantis says she was fired for cyber sexual harassment. bit.ly/2XvqXzB
