With COVID-19 still spreading, Miami-Dade mayor talks of opening county. Bad idea | Opinion
Taking his cue from the false optimism of his newfound idol, President Donald Trump, the mayor of Miami-Dade is talking about opening up the county — when we’re still two weeks away from the expected peak of the novel coronavirus pandemic here.
“We’re seeing a light at the end of this COVID-19 tunnel, starting with the number of hospitalizations that are steadying in Miami-Dade County,” Mayor Carlos Gimenez said in a video released Monday. “That’s a good sign, and we want to move forward in a thoughtful and deliberate way.”
Premature is an understatement.
The reason for the “steadying” is that people finally got the message: Stay home.
The medically vulnerable are dying: Stay home.
There’s a statewide order in place. Finally (on April 1). Stay home.
Models shift, but try this on for thoughtful: The peak of infection is still projected for May 3 by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME).
And this: The numbers of infected keep climbing — 7,241 confirmed cases in Miami-Dade, the Florida hot spot, as are the deaths — and more can be expected as testing is expanded beyond the elderly, healthcare workers, and those showing symptoms.
No new normal in FL hot spot
The mayor’s newly announced initiative of “moving to the new normal” and getting back to “as normal a life as possible” isn’t the right message to send while the novel coronavirus is still spreading in our community.
It has been a mission to get people in South Florida to stop congregating and practice social distancing.
Now that people — finally — seem to be getting the message that they have to stay at home except for essential travel, Gimenez is changing his tune — and most likely enabling the risk takers by announcing that he wants to start working on opening up Miami-Dade for business and back to work.
Is this the same guy who last week sent a scary, personally signed, countywide alert that jolted us, turning our cellphones into emergency sirens?
He’s pliable, a chameleon who changes according to what’s politically convenient.
President Trump wants to restart the economy even though the risks of reopening too soon are too high — and here goes the mayor, who is running for Congress, parroting him. Although he supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 when it was good for him in a countywide election (she won Miami-Dade with 63% of the vote), he’s now all in with Trump.
“He’s grown on me,” Gimenez said recently.
The mayor’s spokeswoman interprets Gimenez’s video message differently.
“Nothing is opening,” his spokeswoman, Myriam Marquez, told me Monday. “He’s setting up working groups to see what conditions have to exist to start easing restrictions in certain categories.”
I doubt that people eager to high-tail it out of the house are likely to interpret what Gimenez is saying as just planning. At best, they’re getting mixed messages.
This isn’t Gimenez’s only misstep in dealing with the coronavirus.
He also said we should “live our lives normally,” on March 5, four days after the state’s first COVID-19 victims were identified in Sarasota and Tampa — and from spring breakers to the Winter Party festival, people partied on, and went home to spread the disease.
He only changed course on March 12, when he canceled the county youth fair and the Miami Open tennis tournament. Then, three days later, he issued a countywide rule that forced bars, restaurants and nightclubs to close at 11 p.m. and operate at half their capacity.
I guess because the coronavirus is only a night owl?
Too much still unknown
“We did what we thought — and I’m sure all cities did what they thought — was the right thing to do at the right time,” Gimenez told The New York Times. “It’s called novel coronavirus for a reason. We don’t really know how it acts.”
That’s right. Miami-Dade lagged behind other cities because “we didn’t know.”
We still don’t know enough about how this coronavirus spreads, but we do know it’s not just like a bad flu.
So why would we rush to open, for example, the parks that were cordoned off and we were told could be a transmission point for the virus, which lingers on surfaces for an unknown amount of time?
I don’t hear medical authorities saying it’s time to get back to normal.
Florida’s surgeon general says we need to keep social distancing and wearing a mask until there’s a vaccine — in about a year. Don’t let your guard down, Scott Rivkees said.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the United States’ most visible disease expert, said that once the number of seriously ill people sharply declines, then officials can begin to “think about a gradual reentry of some sort of normality, some rolling reentry.”
And he cautioned: When restrictions are eased, “we know that there will be people who will be getting infected. I mean, that is just reality. “
The president — who only wants to hear he’s doing great at 582,617 confirmed cases and 23,344 deaths, equal to almost eight versions of 9/11 — retweeted a #FireFauci hashtag to his 76 millions followers on Sunday.
Late to react like Trump and early to consider reentry, Gimenez is once again wrong.
Opening the county is a very bad idea.
