Jonathan Davis writes at Trending Politics about Florida’s defiance of Biden administration COVID-19 expectations.

One of President Joe Biden’s advisers expressed genuine shock over the monumental differences in how Florida, under the leadership of GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis, managed to keep its COVID-19 death and illness rates stable even though he took an ‘open the economy’ approach rather than a ‘lockdown the economy’ approach, like his blue state rivals. …

… “Look, there’s so much of this virus that we think we understand that we think we can predict, that’s just beyond, a little bit beyond our explanation, but we do know is that the more careful people are, the more they mask and social distance, and the quicker we vaccinate, the quicker it goes away and the less it spreads,” [Andy] Slavitt said. …

… What isn’t difficult to understand is that DeSantis, early on, took a far different approach than his New York Democratic gubernatorial colleague, Andrew Cuomo. The former moved specifically to protect the elderly and the infirm in nursing homes; the latter ordered eldercare facilities in his state to take in patients sick with COVID-19 and the result was predictable. …

… “What we showed in Florida is you need to lead. I got a lot of blowback. A lot of that was BS, quite frankly,” DeSantis told Politico. “We led on schools. We led on putting people back to work. We would not have had a Super Bowl [in Tampa] if it was not for me.”

The Florida Republican also swatted at “the national media and all these people who are self-anointed experts … They all said Florida would be the worst. But COVID mortality is less than the national average per capita.”

“Our economy is better than the national average,” he continued noting that the state’s unemployment rate is low. There is also a booming real estate market and the state treasury is taking in higher-than-expected tax revenues.