Majority of Florida residents oppose DeSantis block on Covid protections

Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, is facing a backlash from his generally conservative constituents for his numerous acts to stifle coronavirus mitigation efforts.

A new poll from Quinnipac has revealed that residents in Florida are generally in favour of more coronavirus mitigation efforts, including mask mandates.

Mr DeSantis recently issued an executive order prohibiting school districts from enforcing mask mandates for students. He has also threatened to cut off funding to school districts and officials who defy his order.

According to the poll, 60 per cent of Florida voters support school mask mandates, with only 36 per cent opposed.

Mr DeSantis’s threat to cut off funding was also widely opposed, with only 25 per cent of respondents agreeing that the policy is a good idea.

Even when broken down by political party, the poll found that a majority of Republican voters opposed Mr DeSantis withholding pay from school administrators for defying the mask order.

Tim Malloy, a polling analyst from Quinnipac, explained the results of the survey.

“As Covid-19 makes a frightening resurgence, it's Tallahassee versus the teaching institutions,” he said. “Thumbs down from Floridians on DeSantis’s ban on mask requirements in public schools. Thumbs down on DeSantis’s call to freeze pay of administrators who mandate mask wearing. And he gets scant support from fellow Republicans on penalising the school leaders who defy him.”

The coronavirus – in particular the highly contagious Delta variant – has ravaged Florida, making it the second most infected place on the planet.

Over the weekend, Covid-19 cases in Florida have reached the the highest point since the pandemic began, and is now the only state in which the number of daily fatalities are exceeding previous waves of the virus.

To illustrate the scope of the pandemic in the state, a group of 75 doctors in South Florida staged a walkout on Monday to draw attention to the surge in unvaccinated Covid-19 patients being hospitalised.

The doctors said they were fatigued and frustrated by misinformation driving the vaccine resistance among largely conservative individuals.

“It’s incredibly frustrating because we know the vaccines are safe and effective and it’s people that go out and talk against them that really go against physicians and medicine and science. It’s not the message we want to get across to people,” one doctor, JT Snarkski, told MSNBC. “Vaccines are safe and we need to get our communities vaccinated.”

Over the course of one week, five police officers in South Florida died of Covid-19, and a mother lost two of her sons to the virus over the course of 12 hours.

On Tuesday, Florida recorded 21,208 new Covid-19 cases, and six new deaths. In total, the state has 3,103,941 confirmed Covid-19 cases and 42,722 deaths.