The Next U.S. Presidential Election will be a Battle Over Pandemic Memory

When Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor and 2024 presidential hopeful, was inaugurated for a second term in February, DeSantis centered his vision for the next four years on the idea that “freedom lives” in the Sunshine State. Baked into DeSantis’ speech was an emerging battle for the public memory of the COVID-19 pandemic. “Over the past few years,” he said, “as so many states in our country grinded their citizens down, we in Florida lifted our people up. When other states consigned their people’s freedom to the dustbin, Florida stood strongly as freedom’s linchpin.” Yet behind this soaring rhetoric of liberty lies a very uncomfortable fact that DeSantis wants us to forget: Florida has been among the worst-performing states when it comes to protecting people from COVID-19 deaths. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] As Oliver Johnson, mathematician at the University of Bristol, England, noted last December, if Florida were a country, its COVID-19 death rate would put it at “10th worst in the world, behind Peru and various East European countries that got slammed pre-vaccine.” It’s true that Florida has a high proportion of older people, who face the greatest risk of death from COVID-19 if infected by the coronavirus, and the state’s performance looks better if its COVID-19 death rate is adjusted for age. And when you examine deaths from all causes (known as “all-cause m...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 freelance Source Type: news