Ron DeSantis claims his response to the pandemic was a huge success, but a new study has found exceptionally high “excess deaths” in Florida during the second year of COVID when testing and vaccines were widely available.
“Rural Southern communities, including Black communities, were heavily affected due to failures in state policies and a failure to support rural health infrastructure — especially the failure to get ‘shots in arms’ in these areas,” Stokes said. “There also is a misconception that rural America [equals] white people. Black communities sustained excess COVID mortality in later stages of the pandemic, and that reflects lack of access.
“The story of the second year of the pandemic is a story of white mortality rates increasing without a marked decline in Black and Hispanic mortality rates,” Stokes said. “The [racial] disparities declined in the second year, but not because rates improved noticeably for Black and Hispanic populations. It was more that white death rates got worse due to partisanship and misinformation.”
The COVID virus first swept cities in the Northeast in 2020, but by July 21, 2021, rates of excess mortality in the nonmetro West and South had eclipsed the urban Northeast. Cumulative rates of excess mortality remained higher in the nonmetropolitan South than in any other region through the end of February 2022, including in Florida, where excess deaths spiked in rural counties relative to the cities and suburbs.
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