Ron DeSantis to assemble task force on reopening Florida amid pandemic

Ron DeSantis

Gov. Ron DeSantis will announce a task force, likely this week, exploring what phase two of the state’s COVID-19 response will look like as the coronavirus pandemic continues.

That task force will work on solutions for the economy, education, quality of life and physical and mental health.

With the economy backsliding, hundreds of thousands of Floridians unemployed and deadlines approaching on extending various orders attempting to preserve public health in the face of COVID-19, the Governor must choose when and how to reopen the economy.

“Part of what we’re going to be doing, and I’ll be announcing probably this week, we’re creating a task force on what the phase two looks like, what does a reopening look like,” DeSantis told reporters Tuesday.

The Governor waited more than a month after the Department of Health first reported a confirmed coronavirus case in Florida to issue a statewide stay-at-home order, one of the latest states to do so. Balancing the economy and the uneven distribution of the virus in the state factored into his decision to lock down Florida.

DeSantis must also decide when to send kids back to school, if at all, this school year. The current executive order runs until May 1, meaning students would return May 4.

But DeSantis and Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran have made no decision yet on whether to extend the deadline.

“We’re just in a situation where we’ve got to see where we’re going,” DeSantis said. “It doesn’t mean that they are going to go back, but I think we just need to get down this road a little bit farther.”

Allowing students to return to campus for a couple of weeks in May would at least help restart a sense of normalcy, DeSantis and Corcoran said Thursday. But Surgeon General Scott Rivkees said Monday that heightened precautions are the new normal until a vaccine is developed, possibly six months or a year or two down the line.

However, DeSantis seemed to take a different tone Tuesday.

“We’re assuming — maybe there’ll be an antiviral developed.”

The task force’s questions on education would encompass what the fall semester would look like in K-12 schools and higher education.

“Maybe there’ll be this wave and then a second wave comes back in the fall, so there’s a lot of things you need to be prepared for,” DeSantis said.

And as restaurants are allowed to reopen their dining rooms, the task force would address what restaurants will look like in the second phase of the COVID-era. Before issuing the statewide stay-at-home order, the Governor ordered restaurants to operate at 50% seating capacity and keep tables the federally recommended six feet apart.

And while closing gyms is another “textbook” recommendation by federal health officials, he called obesity the number one factor in whether a person is susceptible to severe cases of COVID-19.

“My fear has been kind of in the last few months and continue going, I wonder how the physical activity has been,” he said. “We’ve got to figure out a way to get people to be able to enjoy the outdoors, to be able to go out of the house.”

Mental health also deserves consideration, he said.

“We don’t know for sure, because this has really never been tried in modern American before, but there are obviously going to be second order effects, and those are going to be things we have to deal with here in the state of Florida.”