Morgues and crematories are full or getting there. Public utilities in Orlando and Tampa have asked residents to cut back on water usage so liquid oxygen, which is used in water treatment, can be conserved for hospitals. As of Friday,
Florida was recording an average of 242 virus deaths a day, nearly as many as California and Texas combined, though a few states still had a higher per capita rate, according to public health data tracked by The New York Times.
Florida’s pandemic data, more scant since the state ended its declared Covid-19 state of emergency in June, reveals only limited information about who is dying. Hospitals have said upward of 90 percent of their patients have been unvaccinated. Exactly why the state has been so hard-hit remains an elusive question. Other states with comparable vaccine coverage have a small fraction of Florida’s hospitalization rate.
The best explanation of what has happened is that
Florida’s vaccination rates were good, but not good enough for its demographics. It has so many older people that even vaccinating a vast majority of them left more than 800,000 unprotected. Vaccination rates among younger people were uneven, so clusters of people remained at risk. Previous virus waves, which were milder than in some other states, conferred only some natural immunity.
And Florida is Florida: People have enjoyed many months of barhopping, party-going and traveling, all activities conducive to swift virus spread.
Unlike in places like Oregon, which is clamping down again, adopting even outdoor mask mandates, Mr. DeSantis continues to stay the course, hoping to power through despite the devastating human toll. A Quinnipiac University poll released this past week found that Mr. DeSantis’s approval rating was 47 percent.
He and other state officials have sought to steer away from measures that could curtail infections, banning strict mask mandates in public schools. The biggest school districts imposed them anyway, and on Friday, a state judge ruled that Florida could not prevent those mandates, a decision the Department of Education plans to appeal.
Florida has experienced more deaths than normal — from all causes, not just Covid-19 — throughout the pandemic. In the early weeks of 2021, with cases surging and the vaccine rollout kicking off, the state averaged 5,600 deaths each week, about a third more than typical for that time of year, according to mortality figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The deaths dropped and then went back up.
These excess deaths are important, both because a number of Covid-19 deaths occur outside hospitals, and because the virus may contribute to deaths from other causes as a result of the strain on the health system.
In the first week of August, the state recorded another 5,600 deaths. But because mortality rates normally drop during summer months,
the figure was more than 50 percent above what’s typical.
Those who did not get vaccinated are only part of the explanation behind the surge. Many states slammed by the virus earlier developed deep reservoirs of natural immunity from prior infections, affording them higher levels of protection than would be evident from vaccination rates alone.
Not so in Florida. Compared to other states, Florida was spared as devastating a wintertime wave of cases as ravaged other parts of the country — in part because warm weather made it possible for people to gather outdoors. That was a boon to Florida’s economy and its political leaders but a liability come summertime, when the state was unable to rely on the same wall of natural immunity that is now helping to shield places walloped by the virus this winter.
The situation in nursing homes, where infections can spread swiftly, has also been problematic. While vaccination rates among older Floridians as a whole have been good,
the rate of nursing home residents who are fully vaccinated — an average of 73.1 percent in each home — is lower than every state but Nevada, according to the C.D.C. About 47.5 percent of nursing home staff members were fully vaccinated as of Aug. 15, the lowest of any state but Louisiana.