POLITICO NIGHTLY: Florida Man gets a Covid do-over

 

BY MARC CAPUTO With help from Myah Ward ETERNAL SUNSHINE — Greetings from the capital city of Florida, where college, and college football, is sort of back in session. Public schools are starting to fully open back up. Coronavirus cases, positive rates, deaths and hospitalizations are falling. Normally, this would seem like the time for a good stiff drink. To that end, with bar owners crippled by state-imposed shutdowns, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will allow watering holes to reopen Monday at half capacity. At the same time, he announced today, Miami-Dade County will begin another reopening phase, greenlighting the eventual reopening of public schools there — and therefore rekindling one of the biggest public health experiments in the Sunshine State, a place that, more so than anywhere else, will once again help decide who wins the White House in November. In back-to-back press conferences over the past two days, DeSantis accentuated the positives and tried to eliminate the negatives, such as the relatively high number of Covid-related deaths (176 new deaths reported today, 213 on Thursday). DeSantis focused Thursday on a drop in emergency room visits, saying that the emphasis on new case increases is “sometimes ... overreacting”: “Tens of thousands of people tested positive, and they haven't found one hospital admission yet. Sometimes you’ve just got to put these cases in perspective.” DeSantis has been in this situation before, heralding the state’s reopening in the spring, confident he was on the right course. But after he swaggered and fumed that his critics got it all wrong, the state watched cases, deaths and hospitalizations skyrocket. Now DeSantis is more measured, but will the results be the same? Unlike early June, when the state arguably opened too quickly and citizens failed to wear masks, Floridians have an eerie feeling of déjà vu. “It sort of feels like Groundhog Day,” said University of South Florida epidemiologist Jason L. Salemi, summing up the feelings of so many scientists and health officials. Figures don’t lie, but who figures? It’s hard to feel secure about the state’s data. Salemi has produced his own Covid-tracker that lists three ways just to calculate the positivity rate, a key metric to decide whether to reopen. Mark Settles, a University of Florida horticulture professor who has produced some of the most incisive analyses of coronavirus cases in the state on his Facebook page, said the testing is inadequate and fretted: “The number of positives have gone up and the number of tests have gone down. We’re doing the opposite of what we should be doing.” Hospitalizations are a key metric, but even that number can be misleading, Settles said. “The disturbing trend is the percent of people dying without going to the hospital has been increasing.” And the DeSantis administration is pressuring schools to hide coronavirus cases from teachers and parents in the name of patient privacy. School districts are defying the order in the name of transparency and public health. Florida epidemiologists say they understand DeSantis’s push to open schools, but they say bars are a totally different matter. It’s a good way to have a one-night stand with coronavirus. “Interior restaurants are a problem,” said Florida International University epidemiologist Aileen Marty. “We know these things. Deductive logic told us it was true. Now we have empirical evidence.” Marty is advising Miami-Dade County and its school board on reopening. At today’s press conference, Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez said bars will remain closed in his area because “we’re not out of the woods yet,” a line that DeSantis tellingly didn’t use (and almost never does). That refusal by DeSantis frustrates Marty: “What he needs to do is encourage good behavior. ‘Hey, let’s keep going in the right direction. Wear your mask.’ But he doesn’t. It’s nuts. It makes no sense.” To this day, DeSantis has refused to mandate mask use statewide. Like DeSantis, President Donald Trump has had a complicated relationship with mask-wearing. He has mocked Joe Biden at times for wearing masks, even though the CDC recommends their use. And his rallies increasingly feature large numbers of people without masks or social distancing. The simplest explanation for DeSantis’s reticence to issue a statewide mask-wearing order and his relatively sunny view of coronavirus in Florida is that he is trying to help the man who helped him win his GOP primary in 2018 and, therefore, the Governor’s Mansion. But the reality is probably more complicated and deeply felt. DeSantis is through-and-through a conservative. He’s not an anti-mask Covid truther. But he’s deeply skeptical of academics and scientists who want lockdowns that hurt businesses and the economy. The question is whether DeSantis is embracing a false choice that, ultimately, will lead to a fresh round of infections, hospitalizations and deaths that will start to peak just in time for Election Day, crushing lives, the economy and Trump’s chances of reelection in a state he needs to carry if he wants four more years in the White House. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly: Coronavirus Special Edition. Nightly’s Tyler Weyant wants to know why NFL MVP Lamar Jackson wasn’t mentioned in Thursday’s newsletter. Reach out rrayasam@politico.com or on Twitter at @renurayasam. New York City firefighters pause outside of Engine Company 10 and Ladder Company 10 across from One World Trade Center in lower Manhattan during commemoration ceremonies for the September 11, 2001, terror attacks. | Getty Images FIRST IN NIGHTLY THE LANDLORDS’ LAMENT — The White House’s move to ban evictions across the country during the pandemic is having an unintended side-effect: It’s threatening the livelihood of millions of landlords, financial services reporter Katy O'Donnell writes. The sweeping order effectively requires landlords to subsidize distressed tenants’ housing through the end of the year or face criminal penalties and hefty fines. That’s a tall order for the country’s 8 million independent landlords – most of whom lease a unit here or there on property they own without the financial backing of professional management companies. More than 22 million rental units, a little over half the rental housing in the country, are in single-family buildings with between one and four units, according to data compiled by the Urban Institute. And most of those buildings have a mortgage — meaning the property owners themselves still need to make their own monthly payments. “In a four-unit building, if one person can’t pay rent you’ve just lost 25 percent of your income,” Pinnegar said. Most of the units are owned by mom-and-pop landlords, many of whom invested in property to save for retirement. Now they’re dealing with a dramatic drop in income, facing the prospect of either trying to sell their property or going into debt to meet financial obligations including mortgage and insurance payments, property taxes, utilities and maintenance costs. If enough landlords can no longer make those payments, it would threaten everything from the school budgets funded by property taxes to the stability of the $11 trillion U.S. mortgage market itself. Six months into the crisis, millions of tenants can no longer meet their rent — and the situation is only getting worse. Tenants already owe some $25 billion in back rent and will owe nearly $70 billion by the end of the year, according to an estimate last month by Moody’s Analytics. Trump’s Sept. 1 announcement offered no rental assistance for tenants, meaning that when the order expires on Dec. 31, they’re still on the hook for months of back rent. And it offered no relief for landlords either. One in three tenants failed to make their September rent payment on time, according to the latest Apartment List survey. And a little over 25 percent said they had slight or no confidence in their ability to pay their rent this month, according to Census data published Wednesday, with another 22 percent expressing only moderate confidence. ASK THE AUDIENCE Is your child heading back to school? If so, Nightly wants to hear from them. Parents and students can send us a short, 1-3 minute voice memo recording to audio@politico.com by Friday, Sept. 11. Please include (1) names, (2) hometown, and (3) the answer to this prompt: Describe the first day of school this year, whether it was remote or in-person. (Anecdotes are encouraged!) Please try to record in a quiet area and hold the phone as if you were talking to someone, but about 1-2 inches from your face. We're accepting submissions from students (and parents of students) from kindergarten through 12th grade. If your student is a minor, parents/guardians, please acknowledge somewhere in the email that you are giving POLITICO permission to use the audio for our podcasts or audio production if we choose to do so. (We can also use the student’s first name only if privacy is a concern.) We’ll use select submissions next week in Nightly. COVID-2020 THE BIDEN BUBBLE — Biden is back on the campaign trail after months of quarantining in the basement of his Delaware home, but his team is still trying to keep him inside an impenetrable coronavirus bubble. In the latest POLITICO Dispatch, national political reporter Christopher Cadelago breaks down the extreme lengths the Biden campaign is going to prevent the candidate from being exposed to coronavirus. Listen to the latest POLITICO Dispatch podcast PUNCHLINES THAT’S A WRAP — Matt Wuerker takes us through the week in cartoons and satire, featuring Bob Woodward’s tell-all book, the continuing fires in the American West and Russian interference in the elections. THE GLOBAL FIGHT ‘CLEARLY DETERIORATING’ — French Prime Minister Jean Castex warned today that the coronavirus situation in France was “clearly deteriorating” and announced new measures to improve testing capacity and contact tracing. “The virus is circulating more and more in France, the incidence rate has risen to 72 cases per 100,000 people, compared to 57 cases per 100,000 people a week ago,” Castex said. The prime minister said a “general lockdown” had to be avoided and called on people to respect health measures including mask-wearing, European policy reporter Elisa Braun writes. He also announced that the duration of quarantine for anyone with coronavirus symptoms would be reduced from 14 days to 7 days. Local governors of Bordeaux, Marseille and the island of Guadeloupe will have to send Castex proposals by Monday on the implementation of stricter rules, as the regions have seen a rapid surge of hospitalizations. Almost 10,000 new cases of coronavirus were reported by health authorities between Wednesday and Thursday in France, but hospitalizations remain low compared to the first wave, with 615 people in resuscitation beds. NIGHTLY NUMBER 51 percent The proportion of workers who believe their office spaces are safe, according to an Edelman survey of respondents in France, Germany, India, Singapore, South Korea, the U.K. and the U.S. PARTING WORDS THE FIRST POST-9/11 ELECTION — Chief Washington correspondent Ryan Lizza emails us: Joe Biden took a low key approach to Sept. 11, 2020. His campaign announced it would suspend all political advertising on 9/11, a bipartisan custom in presidential election years. Biden told reporters early this morning that he wouldn’t be making any news on this “solemn day.” He attended the annual Sept. 11 Commemoration Ceremony in lower Manhattan, along with Vice President Mike Pence and several current and former New York elected officials, but he didn’t speak. He later laid a wreath at the memorial commemorating the crash of Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pa. He talked to family members who lost loved ones. He brought six packs of beer to firefighters. He put out a statement. Trump decided to forgo the customary suspension of political ads. In the morning, he spoke at the annual Flight 93 remembrance in Shanksville, an event that a spokesperson for the Park Service, which maintains the site, told me had originally been planned as an abbreviated 20-minute private ceremony restricted to the family members of those who died. The president was very much in a news-making mood. In the afternoon he held an Oval Office announcement of the normalization of relations between Israel and Bahrain and conducted a Medal of Honor Ceremony for a soldier who rescued hostages in Iraq in 2015. In New York, Pence recorded a TV interview with Fox News. While the two approaches to the day were a study in contrasts, the truth is that in 2020 — unlike the election years of 2004, 2008, 2012 and 2016 — the 9/11 anniversary was muted. The politics of it became, particularly after the early months of this year, less central to the lives of most Americans. The threat from foreign terrorism has faded. The Department of Homeland Security now reports that white supremacists are the greatest terrorist threat. More immediately, the threat from the coronavirus pandemic, which will soon have killed 200,000 Americans — or 67 9/11s — is more acute. To many Americans right now, especially people of color, the threat from armed police officers seems far more worrisome. Many others are dealing with life and death struggles related to the economic collapse. The threats from climate change (just ask people dealing with fires in California and flooding in Miami) and nuclear proliferation are considered by many foreign policy experts to be more existential in the long run. All of that means that foreign terrorism, absent another attack, will play less of a role in 2020 than any presidential campaign since 9/11. That’s a good thing. It means the threat has diminished. But a lot of other bad things have replaced it. Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here.   Follow us on Twitter Renuka Rayasam @renurayasam   FOLLOW US

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