Cheap flights, cheap hotels and the opportunity to party in a place with lots of sunshine and virtually no Covid-19 restrictions have created a “perfect storm” amid the pandemic in South Florida, the mayor said. of Miami warned Monday.
Local officials are campaigning for more spring unrest, such as the one that took place in Miami Beach over the weekend when the crowd became too large and wild and the police hit hard, he said.
“There is no doubt that Miami and the Miami area and the state are probably one of the most open states in the entire country,” Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, a Republican, told MSNBC. ‘It’s created a perfect storm where there are people who can come to Miami. It’s very cheap. I was told that some flights cost $ 50 and even the hotels are very cheap. So it was a very difficult mix of cheap flights, cheap hotels and known as probably the most open place in the country. ”
Suarez spoke out a day after city leaders on the other side of Biscayne Bay in Miami Beach voted to extend an evening clock in the South Beach entertainment district until the end of this month and possibly until mid-April.
“We are, of course, preparing for the possibility that some of these actions taking place in Miami Beach could spill over with the early evening clock and the early closure of the roads of people entering Miami Beach, so we are prepared for that,” he said. said.
Suarez’s concerns about an avalanche of spring visitors from far and wide who are unwilling to wear masks or socialize – and which are not required by local authorities – have been voiced for weeks by public health experts .
“Any event that involves increased travel and that people relax preventative measures is worrying,” Amber D’Souza, a professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told NBC News earlier. “This is exactly what we saw after Thanksgiving and after Christmas … It’s a constant cycle and a constant worry.”
Overcrowded South Florida was at the center of the pandemic in a state where more than 2 million people were infected and 33,369 died from Covid-19, according to the most recent version of NBC News.
Since February, when the raid began, Miami Beach police have conducted more than 1,000 arrests – half of them residents outside the state.
Local police are practicing to the extreme, so Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber called for strengthening neighboring Dade County communities, as well as the Florida Highway Patrol.
And the crowds that came down on Miami Beach are different this year, the mayor said.
“I can not see that it is a kind of spring break, because I do not think it is university children,” he said on Sunday. ‘I think it changes the nature of what we see here. I think there are very few open spaces since our state was open. ”
In Florida, as in most of the state, the daily number of Covid-19 cases, deaths and hospitalizations has decreased as more and more people are vaccinated, according to NBC News figures.
But the state leads the country in varieties that are even more contagious, and the positive percentage of the Covid-19 test has climbed, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican who appears to be positioning himself as former President Donald Trump’s heir to the White House, has been widely criticized for his pandemic performance and is accused by Democratic rivals and others of using vaccines to spread political points. to achieve. with important constituencies such as senior citizens.
DeSantis defended his decision not to impose mask mandates and lift restrictions on the economy, and sought advice from the same scientists Trump trusted, such as Dr. Scott Atlas and dr. Jay Bhattacharya, both of Stanford University, The South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported.
Most public health experts have exposed, among other things, their practical approach to the pandemic, opposition to barriers and skepticism about the effectiveness of masks.
While the initial explosion of the vaccines was marked by chaos and poor planning, about a quarter of the state’s population received at least one shot as of Monday and 13 percent were fully vaccinated, according to New York Times statistics. This puts Florida (the country with the third population group) on an equal footing with California (the country with the largest population) and is slightly behind half of the other states, although not much.
