I believe it was Martin Luther King Jr. who said that if a governor issues an executive order and that governor is the governor of Florida, then fuck that governor because he’s an idiot whose ban on mask mandates is going to let people die.
In a 24-hour span, three teachers and a teaching assistant in Florida’s Broward County have died from complications of COVID-19. And since Broward County Public Schools has known that its governor is a complete COVIDiot, earlier this week, the district was like, fuck Gov. Ron DeSantis, and issued its own mask mandate.
According to CBS Miami, three of the four teachers were unvaccinated and all four—one a high-school teacher, another taught in elementary school, and the teaching assistant and the remaining teacher were from the same school—were on summer break when they caught the coronavirus and died right before the school year was set to begin.
“It’s extremely frightening,” Broward Teachers Union President Anna Fusco told CBS Miami. “I hear this every day. Whether in Broward or elsewhere. We’re the fifth-largest union in the country.
“It really hits because we’ve been in this conversation about masking up in schools, our own elected governor acting like masks are not necessary.”
From Insider:
Broward County is located in southeastern Florida and includes Fort Lauderdale. Earlier this week, the Broward County Public Schools board defied Gov. Ron DeSantis’ ban on mask mandates. They voted 8-1 to require staff members and students to wear face coverings amid a record-breaking spike in the state’s coronavirus cases.
“Bring it,” said one board member, Nora Rupert, after DeSantis threatened to withhold paychecks of school officials who made masks mandatory.
A representative for DeSantis previously told Insider’s Connor Perret that DeSantis wanted to protect parents’ rights to choose whether their kids should wear masks.
A school district in Marion County, which is located four hours from Broward, northwest of Orlando, reported Friday that four members of its teaching staff had also died from COVID-19 over the summer.
In July, DeSantis, the president of the Trump fan club called “Hey, Daddy Am I Doing It Right?,” issued an executive order banning mask mandates for Florida public schools despite cases of COVID-19 rising among children.
More than 800 Florida physicians signed an open letter earlier this week urging DeSantis to revise his policy.
“This past week, COVID-19 has infected more than 19,000 Floridians every day, the worst weekly infection rate since the pandemic began, and hospitalized an average of 1,800 Floridians daily,” the letter said, WPTV reports . “In the last week of July, at least 35 children were hospitalized every day for COVID-19 in Florida, a number that is very likely an undercount since Gov. DeSantis stopped sharing COVID-19 statistics.”