Rick Scott says ‘quite a few’ Floridians died from COVID-19 … but at least we aren’t New York

Image via Sen. Rick Scott.

Sen. Rick Scott, on Fox Business Thursday afternoon, says that while “quite a few” Floridians have died during the COVID-19 epidemic, at least the state isn’t New York.

“Well, we clearly, we unfortunately have had quite a few people die, but we haven’t had the problems New York has had where we had the Governor sit up there and send COVID patients to a nursing home,” Scott said during “After the Bell.”

Indeed, there have been a lot of COVID-19 deaths, but not as many in Florida as New York.

Official tabulations have the number at 10,868 as of Thursday morning, far below New York’s cumulative death toll of 32,499.

Scott, who has not been particularly close to Gov. Ron DeSantis, likewise has clashed with New York’s Democratic Governor, Andrew Cuomo, a friction that perhaps informed his decision to carry a narrative that DeSantis has trafficked throughout the coronavirus spring and summer.

The Cuomo/DeSantis back and forth is well-documented.

The Governor spent much of the spring crowing about how Florida escaped the fatal fate of New Yorkers, many of whom died from the virus, but by the middle of June the optics had shifted, and New York was preparing to quarantine arriving Floridians along with those from other hotspot states.

DeSantis’ biting rejoinder was that if they were to be quarantined, it shouldn’t be in New York nursing homes.

The quarantine was imposed days later, and the starch had gone out of the Governor’s attacks.

“They’ve got to do what they’ve got to do,” the Governor said about the decision, adding that he didn’t want to quarantine New Yorkers earlier in the year, but he had to.

The Scott/Cuomo dynamic has likewise been one of parrying via live microphones at press conferences.

Scott’s position is that New York seeks federal bailout money because of bad budget bets in the past, not current needs.  Cuomo has said that Scott was “playing the American people” by making those arguments.