The number of coronavirus cases and fatalities in Florida is at its peak, so what better time to drop restrictions on social distancing and open the beaches back up?
What? You don’t see the logic in that? You think we should wait until the number of active cases declines so fewer people are exposed to the deadly communicable disease?
Ha! You don’t know Florida Man!
Florida Man don’t do no logic. Florida Man ain’t afraid of no invisible cooties. Or as Florida resident Donald Trump defined them:
“You call it a germ, you can call it a flu, you can call it a virus. You know, you can call it many different names. I’m not sure anybody even knows what it is.”
That was a few weeks before he suggested we should all start swilling Clorox and sticking ultraviolet lights into portions of our anatomies where the sun don’t shine.
So, with leadership like that from Florida Men in the White House and the Statehouse, big surprise the barricades are coming down and the beaches are about to be flooded like they were during Spring Break, which, of course, didn’t go so well last time, but that was then and this is now.
But not everyone is excited about this. There’s this party pooper in the Florida Panhandle, a lawyer named Daniel Uhlfelder, who has taken to donning a Grim Reaper outfit and making a nuisance of himself on the shoreline—a one-man buzz kill trying to warn people to stay away from one another.
Why’s he doing it?
“This is a way in which I can convey the message that this virus is a deadly virus and that we need to think about this and take some time before we jump into these types of things,” he told USA Today. “This is a symbol of how serious this situation is.”
Actually knowing how serious the situation is can be a bit of a struggle here in the Sunshine State. Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, has barred medical examiners from revealing records showing the true death toll and has tried to intimidate the state’s newspapers from poking around in the numbers.
Those numbers that we do have show that more than 1,200 people have succumbed to the disease, but the actual death count is undoubtedly higher. And that’s just Florida. Nationwide, more people have been killed by COVID-19 in the past few months than in all of the Vietnam War.
Uhlfelder announced on Twitter that he’s taking his Grim Reaper act on the road, starting a tour of Florida’s beaches in an effort to warn people against being stupid.
“It it illustrates the absurdity of what’s going on in Florida. We’re in the middle of a global pandemic and people are worried about going to the beach … rather than living.”
STRANGE FACT: The White House Gift Shop is selling coronavirus commemorative coins for $100 each. But it should be pointed out that it is a private business not the White House at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. As you might imagine, this tastelessness is causing a furor.
