Pinellas County Democrats blast Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis for poor virus leadership

Three of Pinellas County’s most prominent elected officials joined former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign on a call blasting Republican leadership for a lackluster COVID-19 pandemic response.

Speaking during a press call Wednesday, St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Kriseman criticized President Donald Trump for his lack of leadership, arguing a President Biden would do better.

“As a Mayor, if we had real leadership in the White House – if Joe Biden were president today – our communities and our lives would be very different. Without that leadership, the burden has fallen to local leaders because there is that void in the White House. When you have a man that puts an ‘open for business’ sign up and basically says that’s it, a man who says to stop testing as the solution, we have problems,” Kriseman said.

Kriseman pointed to Biden’s Plan for an Effective Re-Opening that Jumpstarts the Economy.

“When you look at what the Vice President has put forth in his plans, it is smart, measured, and takes the step we need to open our economy in a way where we’re not going to be shutting it down in a couple of days or weeks. Our country would be incredibly different if we had real leadership in the White House,” he said.

Biden’s plan calls for robust testing and contact tracing, including testing availability for all workers returning to their jobs. It also calls for better protections for those with high risk including by requiring employers to tailor work settings for those individuals to keep them safe and it calls for financial help for small businesses to help them rehire and retrain workers, a barrier in some cases to reopening.

While some of the components mirror federal guidelines and those from Gov. Ron DeSantis, local leaders contend national and state guidance has amounted to an open sign with little mitigation or caution.

“We’re not getting the right message from the White House or Tallahassee that would allow us to do this smartly. As we reopen, we have to do it intelligently and by the guidance of the experts, and that’s exactly what the Biden plan would do,” Congressman Charlie Crist said.

Florida is experiencing a consistent uptick in both the number of new cases reported daily and the percentage of positive tests related to overall testing, a key metric health officials say should be used in determining strategy.

Yet neither Trump nor DeSantis has expressed a willingness to return to restrictions limiting the types of social interactions and public gatherings that breed community spread.

In a press conference this week, DeSatis told reporters he had no interest in moving backward, only forward. He explained away the rise in the state’s coronavirus caseload noting an increase in overall testing and spikes in areas like prisons and farm communities where close proximity is all but unavoidable.

While positive test rates in early June were low and remained in single digits into mid-June, the Florida Department of Health’s Wednesday report showed the state back to double digits, even with expanded testing averaging 30,000 tests a day.

That statewide percentage also suggested DeSantis’ claim that the uptick in new cases was stemming from prisons and migrant communities was bunk.

“Here in Tampa Bay and across Florida, we’re seeing what a mismanaged reopening looks like as we see a spike in COVID-19 cases,” said Pinellas County Commissioner Ken Welch.

“In Pinellas County, a third of our cases have occurred in the last six days. We need to make sure our reopening is effective,” he added.

Like his Democratic counterparts, Welch blamed optics from the Governor’s mansion and the White House sending residents the message that it’s safe to return to life as usual.