Instead of wasting lab coats for virus photo op, FL governor should inspect airports | Opinion
What’s the common thread with the coronavirus cases reported in Florida and around the United States?
Most of the infected patients traveled to countries where the virus was active or a relative of theirs did.
What’s the most-widely used point of entry?
Airports, and particularly for global travel in Florida, Miami International Airport.
Yet, you don’t see the politicians out there spot-checking them for compliance for sanitation that takes into account the possibility that sick people, whether it’s with the flu or another contagious disease like COVID-19, are passing through.
What you do see from the pols?
Playing coronavirus politics
Just like during hurricane season, they’re camera-ready at photo-op spots trying to send the message: “We’ve got this.”
But, do they really?
Who can forget former Gov. Rick Scott in his blue Navy cap staging hurricane press conferences and keeping reporters away from the real deal, the emergency management briefings!
Fast-forward to a rapidly rapidly-spreading disease that’s warranting the cancellation of events like the Ultra Music Festival in Miami, which attracts tens of thousands of people from around the world.
Gov. Ron DeSantis is an improvement over Scott, no doubt, but he looks more like he’s campaigning than doing real work.
In a recent visual of DeSantis’ handling of the COVID-19 epidemic, he and his team, including Lt. Gov. Jeanette M. Nuñez, are wearing disposable lab coats as they listen to the lab director at the Bureau of Public Health Laboratories explain the testing procedures of potential coronavirus cases.
He’s in white. She’s in pink.
Charming, but let the experts and scientists handle the testing, the procedures — and the information given to the public.
Instead of posing at the Florida Department of Health lab in Tampa maybe the contingent of state leaders should’ve been at the airport (run by a board with a majority of members appointed by the governor) examining conditions for travelers. Likewise for Orlando International Airport.
We don’t need translators on matters of health, whether it’s DeSantis in Florida, or the ramblings of President Donald Trump and the stoic prayerful pose of Vice President Mike Pence from Washington playing the part of leading the containing of the coronavirus.
Where DeSantis and other elected officials are really needed, for example, is hustling for more disease containment resources for Miami International Airport. He and county officials should also be putting pressure on airport contractors to step up to the needs of the times.
“The foulness is disgusting,” I was told Thursday by an airport worker who last November filed an OSHA complaint about conditions at MIA. “You see all the politicians talking and talking, but they’re not doing anything about preventing the virus. It’s business as usual here.”
For the traveling public, he says: “Las cucharachas [the cockroaches] welcome you to Miami.”
People who work at MIA “walk around coughing,” said the long-time employee, one of 672 who work for the cleaning company C&W Services.
Cleaning crew workers like himself are given cheap gloves that easily break, he said, and live scared of the contamination they face every day while cleaning bathrooms. You don’t want to hear the nasty, graphic picture he painted for me.
“When you stick your fingers in the gloves, they break,” he said. “It’s like they bought them at the Ñooo Que Barato [discount] store.”
At the waiting areas, the carpets are filthy and the machines they use to clean “don’t suction the dirt, they only spread it around,” he said.
As for elected officials, he said: “They only come around here when something happens to take a photo.”
Airport spokesman Greg Chin said he was contacting the mammoth C&W Services, headquartered in Massachusetts, to respond to the public’s concerns about cleanliness at MIA.
“We’ve increased the cleaning as coronavirus spread,” Chin said, “we’ve doubled it.”
Milagros Diaz, director of operations for C&W Services, said in a statement that the company has “put in place practices from our established pandemic plan, including a response team for ‘touch point disinfecting.’ “
“We have also added extra cleaning staff on all shifts,” she added. “Following CDC and local authorities’ guidelines, we are continually working with our client and employees to maintain the highest standards of safety and cleanliness at the Miami International Airport, including providing employees with personal safety gear that meets all government standards.”
The latter means that the crappy gloves are being upgraded with more durable ones.
Unfortunately, in Florida, we’ve learned that we can’t trust the politicians’ handling of climate change, the environment, and natural disasters. They want to control the message. The public deserves truthful, unfiltered information.
The global coronavirus outbreak at our doorstep is no different.
Trust the experts of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization, not the politicians, who should have better things to do than entertain us.
One of the top recommendations to prevent the spread of coronavirus from the CDC: Clean and disinfect frequently touched objects and surfaces.
DeSantis might not run Miami International Airport, but if he really wanted to make a difference, instead of blaming the CDC for the lack of testing kits in Florida — the result of Trump’s failure to respond earlier to the China outbreak — he would do things that are more useful on behalf of the public.
If containment is the goal, ditch the lab coats and deep clean Florida’s airports — and frequently.
This story was originally published March 6, 2020 at 6:00 AM.
