Gov. Ron DeSantis gave an abbreviated account of Florida’s reopening during an interview with Fox News host Kayleigh McEnany.
The presidential candidate told a Fox News audience his state only imposed COVID-19 restrictions for a few weeks. In reality, Florida enforced restrictions through most of 2020 on DeSantis’ order.
McEnany raised criticism from conservatives that Florida issued more restrictions than states like Georgia. But DeSantis suggested Florida more effectively stopped local lockdowns.
“What I did more aggressively than anyone was overrule local governments who were imposing these restrictions,” he said in a clip shared by his campaign. “In Florida, the state government did not do very much. We’re talking about a few weeks. Some of the local governments — particularly in South Florida — were trying to impose mandates.”
But that’s, at best, an incomplete telling of Florida’s re-opening in 2020.
DeSantis in April 2020 ordered a statewide lockdown, weeks after Florida reported the first diagnosed COVID-19 cases on the U.S. Eastern Seaboard.
A month later, DeSantis did kick off a phased re-opening of the state. DeSantis suggested in his interview with McEnany that he called off all local restrictions.
“We overruled that. We said you can’t close business. You can’t fine people for not wearing a mask,” he said.
“And we actually issued a blanket pardon for anyone who local government had tried to enforce COVID restrictions against. That is really what opened the floodgate. ‘Cause you can say the state is open, but if every other municipality is doing Faucism, that’s not a free state. We pried the state open at the local level and I think that was really the secret to Florida doing very well.”
That retelling leaves out important timetables. In fact, while he singled out South Florida jurisdictions, DeSantis initially would not let the most populated South Florida counties — Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach — reopen at the same time as other parts of the state which had lower rates of infections.
He allowed Palm Beach to begin reopening in early May, but Miami-Dade wasn’t allowed to kick off reopening until weeks later.
And while DeSantis said state lockdowns existed for only a few weeks, the phased reopening of Florida lasted through most of the year. Schools remained closed for the remainder of the 2019-20 school year, and had social distancing requirements when the new school year started in the fall.
It wasn’t until early June, when a second phase of reopening occurred in most of the state, that bars, movie theaters and casinos could reopen. At that point, they still had to limit occupancy to 50% normal levels.
It was not until late September, five months after the lockdown started, that DeSantis preempted most restrictions on businesses. The state entered its Phase Three Reopening on Sept. 26, a step that had been delayed as Florida saw infections skyrocket over the summer.
But even at that point, DeSantis allowed local governments to limit restaurant capacity to 50%.
He did, at that point, forbid local governments from issuing mask mandates and fining those in violation. But he did not issue the same ban on school district mask mandates until July 2021, before the 2021-22 school year.
DeSantis did not issue his pardon waiving all fines on local restriction violations until June 2021.
Notably, DeSantis faced pressure from the Left throughout the pandemic to do more, and resistance to such calls certainly raised the Governor’s national profile. That arguably positioned him for a viable run for President, which he launched in May.
But while DeSantis did clearly move more quickly than many Democrats wanted in lifting certain COVID-19 restrictions, arguing his statewide mandates lasted only “a few weeks” is underselling the actions the state took amid uncertainty surrounding the global pandemic.
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