6 ms·

Court rules for Florida governor, reinstates ban on mask mandates in FL schools

threatofrain 5y ago
> Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the fourth largest district in the United States, is among more than a dozen school districts that defied DeSantis to imposed mask. This week, the state Department of Education withheld funding from two of those districts. Also notably, https://www.npr.org/2021/09/08/1035157226/miami-covid-19-deaths-schools-district https://www.npr.org/2021/09/08/1035157226/miami-covid-19-dea...
- fastball 5y ago
  Not sure what point you are trying to make?
- mod 5y ago
  Also notably, from your article: "Carvalho said that among the 13 deaths, the majority of people contracted COVID-19 and died before the beginning of the school year. One person had direct contact with students, he said."
krasin 5y ago
No matter what position one holds on the matter, it's always impressive to witness the multi-layer democracy process in the US. Not many countries in the world would have a dispute between a governor, individual school districts, non-profit organizations and judges. The US is a very non-ideal country, but it's a working one.
- TMWNN 5y ago
  >The US is a very non-ideal country, but it's a working one. The US works because of the multilayer democracy process. The combination of federalism and separation of powers in the US is slow, by design. It provides multiple layers of protection against bad ideas. It allows for the governance of a continent-sized country composed of 50 semi-sovereign entities, each acting as mini laboratories for good ideas that can spread elsewhere and to Washington DC.
  - sneak 5y ago
    Many other places work better without this system, so I'm not sure your conclusion supports your premise.
    - TMWNN 5y ago
      Feel free to name the country with more than 100 million people, a continent-sized geography, and a multitude of ethnicities that works "better" than the US. Heck, raise the minimum population to 130 million and use that as the sole criterion. To put another way, every one of the countries with a GDP per capita (PPP-adjusted) (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...>) higher than the US has a population smaller than that of Los Angeles County.
- stevenjohns 5y ago
  > The US is a very non-ideal country, but it's a working one. In many cases it definitely has strong democracy baked into it, much more than the faux-democracy presented in almost every other country in the world. But I wouldn't call it "working." The US has significant, deep-rooted problems from housing to safety -- and US foreign policy, even towards US citizens, is rotten to the core.
- Barrin92 5y ago
  It's a working one because Amazon kept packages coming to your door during the pandemic and the government accelerated the development of vaccines with Warp Speed and because scientists did their job, not because school teachers and governors block each other over minuscule nonsense. The US works despite it's multi-layer democracy, not because of it. All the parts that work aren't democratic.
  - bruiseralmighty 5y ago
    This is quite correct. All of the parts of the United States that actually work are absolute monarchies.
    - danielrpa 5y ago
      But you are not required to be under the full rule of the "kings" and "queens". I don't have much problem doing business with a "monarchy" if you want to call it this way. The problem is when all these "monarchies" are reporting to an ultimate absolute ruler you can't escape...
      - bruiseralmighty 5y ago
        Yes. You're a bit vague in what you mean here, but I will assume that you mean a private monopoly like Google or the Coke-Pepsi duopoly. I don't necessarily disagree with your take, but I take the same concept and run it one step further up the chain as an indictment of government as it is practiced today. For example, we gave the responsibility of arbitrating disputes in a just way to a single monopolistic entity and then become surprised when this entity provides less justice (harsher sentences for drug crimes, racial/gender bias, etc.) for a higher cost (effectively impossible to represent yourself, lengthy trial periods, arbitration process that take so long and cost so much that 'lawfare' is a common parlance). Monopolies are bad full stop. It is simply harder to replace the governmental kind.
  - kybernetyk 5y ago
    Democracy is a soft form of communism. So no wonder the democratic parts don’t work.
- LatteLazy 5y ago
  It really doesnt sounds like it. Why would countries want endless disputes between different levels of their governments? How does that help anyone!?
anothernewdude 5y ago
It would be good for Florida to shed some population and thus have less weight in the electoral college.
- Gibbon1 5y ago
  Stupid Chinese Bat Flu, deadly enough to be problem. Not deadly enough to be solution.
- Proven 5y ago
  I don't think Covid-19 will help you - more than enough people are escaping from socialist strongholds in the US to make up for that!
dustintrex 5y ago
FWIW, the mask mandate ban appears to have precisely zero effect on the COVID situation in Florida, which has been steadily improving ever since schools opened. Here's a blog facetiously suggesting that not wearing masks in school caused the improvement, and while it's obviously written tongue in cheek, from a stats/causality point of view it's pretty much indistinguishable from a lot of arguments for masks. https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2021/09/10/science-opening-schools-without-masks-stops-a-coronaplague-data-from-florida/ https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2021/09/10/science-opening... For better or worse, while we know properly fitted N95s etc work, it's starting to look like "casual" mask wearing (fabric masks loosely worn and taken off regularly for eating etc) is mostly just pointless hygiene theater at this point.
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  China has already mandated N95s, even those with the valves that aren’t allowed in much of the west. The idea I think is that they are focusing filtering inbound while cloth masks only really filter outbound (so wearing the mask protect others, vs an N95 that has a higher chance of protecting the wearer). Florida only reports their numbers once a week now and they aren’t breaking them down by county. They look good because they decided data reporting was no longer important: https://www.newsweek.com/florida-wont-release-number-covid-deaths-individual-counties-despite-surge-cases-1628067 https://www.newsweek.com/florida-wont-release-number-covid-d... I guess DeSantis is taking the ostrich approach? Let’s hope this is just incompetence and not willfully trying to obscure their data. All we really know is that they keep setting records, eg record number of deaths this week https://www.mynews13.com/fl/orlando/news/2021/09/10/florida-covid-deaths-new-pandemic-record https://www.mynews13.com/fl/orlando/news/2021/09/10/florida-...
  - brighttank 5y ago
    Where did you hear that China has mandated N95 masks? I live in Beijing and I can't say I've seen anyone wearing one. We basically have to wear the normal surgical masks when in shops, on public transport etc.
    - 5y ago
CamperBob2 5y ago
Someone posted a facetious comment ("Stupid Chinese bat flu. Deadly enough to be problem. Not deadly enough to be solution.") in reply to an even more offensive one earlier ("Florida needs thinning out anyway" or something along those lines.) Both were quickly sent to -4 [dead] land, but I do think there's an underlying truth behind the offensive sentiment that is going unappreciated. If we were dealing with some kind of hemorrhagic fever that spread like wildfire through all cross-sections of the population, sending dying people lurching into the street within a few hours of infection, moaning and bleeding from their eyes, there would be no controversy. We wouldn't have antivaxxers making up all kinds of ridiculous reasons to avoid the shot, we wouldn't have state governors suing the President or vice versa, and we wouldn't think twice about yanking the broadcast licenses of any Fox or Sinclair affiliates who spread misinformation or otherwise spewed propaganda against best public health practices. We would have something to unite against, rather than something to further divide us. But that's not what happened. The bug is bad but not that bad. It "almost never" kills children, it targets "old" or "fat" people disproportionately, and it "only" kills about 1% of patients. It is bad enough to bring out the worst differences among us, but not bad enough to make us set those differences aside. If an enemy nation sent troops to our shores with orders to kill even 0.1% of our population, we'd all rise up to defeat them... but somehow a virus is different. The virus gets a free pass from 30%-40% of our population which is strongly (but admittedly not exclusively) correlated with a specific political party. Makes no sense, but then, not much does these days.
- sneak 5y ago
  It's just below the danger threshold that would disqualify it for use as a political weapon. 2000 jumbo jets full of dead USians (and counting!) is below that threshold, which is sort of amazing to believe. Human life is cheap to partisans there, apparently.
- tdeck 5y ago
  > If we were dealing with some kind of hemorrhagic fever that spread like wildfire through all cross-sections of the population, sending dying people lurching into the street within a few hours of infection, moaning and bleeding from their eyes, there would be no controversy. Are we sure about that? Scientific measures to control Ebola met with great resistance when they seemed to go against local cultural practices in Africa [1]. While cultural practices in the U.S. are different, I would expect some resistance here too. > The bug is bad but not that bad. It "almost never" kills children, it targets "old" or "fat" people disproportionately Interestingly these are demographics that seem to be somewhat over-represented in Florida given how many retirees move there. [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4709130/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4709130/
dstaley 5y ago
I'm curious if this ruling would have any impact on a district's ability to enforce a uniform policy/dress code. If a district doesn't have the authority to require masks, how can they have the authority to require that students tuck in their shirts?
- notimetorelax 5y ago
  Governor explicitly prohibited mandating wearing masks. He did not prohibit mandating dress code.
  - dstaley 5y ago
    Right, but the executive order issued doesn't usurp the authority of a school district to require a dress code, and as such masks could technically still be required under that authority. I believe this is what's happening in some Texas schools as well.
    - mod 5y ago
      I read that was happening in some Florida counties (I read it about a month ago, right as school began there). I didn't hear how it had gone over with the governor. I think if you say "we won't fund you if you mandate masks," the mechanism for mandating them probably isn't very relevant. Mandating masks via dress code policy is still mandating masks.
supratims 5y ago
FFS, does everything need to go to the courts...

> Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the fourth largest district in the United States, is among more than a dozen school districts that defied DeSantis to imposed mask. This week, the state Department of Education withheld funding from two of those districts. Also notably, https://www.npr.org/2021/09/08/1035157226/miami-covid-19-deaths-schools-district https://www.npr.org/2021/09/08/1035157226/miami-covid-19-dea...

fastball 5y ago
Not sure what point you are trying to make?
mod 5y ago
Also notably, from your article: "Carvalho said that among the 13 deaths, the majority of people contracted COVID-19 and died before the beginning of the school year. One person had direct contact with students, he said."

krasin 5y ago

No matter what position one holds on the matter, it's always impressive to witness the multi-layer democracy process in the US. Not many countries in the world would have a dispute between a governor, individual school districts, non-profit organizations and judges. The US is a very non-ideal country, but it's a working one.

TMWNN 5y ago
>The US is a very non-ideal country, but it's a working one. The US works because of the multilayer democracy process. The combination of federalism and separation of powers in the US is slow, by design. It provides multiple layers of protection against bad ideas. It allows for the governance of a continent-sized country composed of 50 semi-sovereign entities, each acting as mini laboratories for good ideas that can spread elsewhere and to Washington DC.
- sneak 5y ago
  Many other places work better without this system, so I'm not sure your conclusion supports your premise.
  - TMWNN 5y ago
    Feel free to name the country with more than 100 million people, a continent-sized geography, and a multitude of ethnicities that works "better" than the US. Heck, raise the minimum population to 130 million and use that as the sole criterion. To put another way, every one of the countries with a GDP per capita (PPP-adjusted) (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...>) higher than the US has a population smaller than that of Los Angeles County.
stevenjohns 5y ago
> The US is a very non-ideal country, but it's a working one. In many cases it definitely has strong democracy baked into it, much more than the faux-democracy presented in almost every other country in the world. But I wouldn't call it "working." The US has significant, deep-rooted problems from housing to safety -- and US foreign policy, even towards US citizens, is rotten to the core.
Barrin92 5y ago
It's a working one because Amazon kept packages coming to your door during the pandemic and the government accelerated the development of vaccines with Warp Speed and because scientists did their job, not because school teachers and governors block each other over minuscule nonsense. The US works despite it's multi-layer democracy, not because of it. All the parts that work aren't democratic.
- bruiseralmighty 5y ago
  This is quite correct. All of the parts of the United States that actually work are absolute monarchies.
  - danielrpa 5y ago
    But you are not required to be under the full rule of the "kings" and "queens". I don't have much problem doing business with a "monarchy" if you want to call it this way. The problem is when all these "monarchies" are reporting to an ultimate absolute ruler you can't escape...
    - bruiseralmighty 5y ago
      Yes. You're a bit vague in what you mean here, but I will assume that you mean a private monopoly like Google or the Coke-Pepsi duopoly. I don't necessarily disagree with your take, but I take the same concept and run it one step further up the chain as an indictment of government as it is practiced today. For example, we gave the responsibility of arbitrating disputes in a just way to a single monopolistic entity and then become surprised when this entity provides less justice (harsher sentences for drug crimes, racial/gender bias, etc.) for a higher cost (effectively impossible to represent yourself, lengthy trial periods, arbitration process that take so long and cost so much that 'lawfare' is a common parlance). Monopolies are bad full stop. It is simply harder to replace the governmental kind.
- kybernetyk 5y ago
  Democracy is a soft form of communism. So no wonder the democratic parts don’t work.
LatteLazy 5y ago
It really doesnt sounds like it. Why would countries want endless disputes between different levels of their governments? How does that help anyone!?

anothernewdude 5y ago

It would be good for Florida to shed some population and thus have less weight in the electoral college.

Gibbon1 5y ago
Stupid Chinese Bat Flu, deadly enough to be problem. Not deadly enough to be solution.
Proven 5y ago
I don't think Covid-19 will help you - more than enough people are escaping from socialist strongholds in the US to make up for that!

dustintrex 5y ago

FWIW, the mask mandate ban appears to have precisely zero effect on the COVID situation in Florida, which has been steadily improving ever since schools opened. Here's a blog facetiously suggesting that not wearing masks in school caused the improvement, and while it's obviously written tongue in cheek, from a stats/causality point of view it's pretty much indistinguishable from a lot of arguments for masks. https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2021/09/10/science-opening-schools-without-masks-stops-a-coronaplague-data-from-florida/ https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2021/09/10/science-opening... For better or worse, while we know properly fitted N95s etc work, it's starting to look like "casual" mask wearing (fabric masks loosely worn and taken off regularly for eating etc) is mostly just pointless hygiene theater at this point.

seanmcdirmid 5y ago
China has already mandated N95s, even those with the valves that aren’t allowed in much of the west. The idea I think is that they are focusing filtering inbound while cloth masks only really filter outbound (so wearing the mask protect others, vs an N95 that has a higher chance of protecting the wearer). Florida only reports their numbers once a week now and they aren’t breaking them down by county. They look good because they decided data reporting was no longer important: https://www.newsweek.com/florida-wont-release-number-covid-deaths-individual-counties-despite-surge-cases-1628067 https://www.newsweek.com/florida-wont-release-number-covid-d... I guess DeSantis is taking the ostrich approach? Let’s hope this is just incompetence and not willfully trying to obscure their data. All we really know is that they keep setting records, eg record number of deaths this week https://www.mynews13.com/fl/orlando/news/2021/09/10/florida-covid-deaths-new-pandemic-record https://www.mynews13.com/fl/orlando/news/2021/09/10/florida-...
- brighttank 5y ago
  Where did you hear that China has mandated N95 masks? I live in Beijing and I can't say I've seen anyone wearing one. We basically have to wear the normal surgical masks when in shops, on public transport etc.
  - 5y ago

CamperBob2 5y ago

Someone posted a facetious comment ("Stupid Chinese bat flu. Deadly enough to be problem. Not deadly enough to be solution.") in reply to an even more offensive one earlier ("Florida needs thinning out anyway" or something along those lines.) Both were quickly sent to -4 [dead] land, but I do think there's an underlying truth behind the offensive sentiment that is going unappreciated. If we were dealing with some kind of hemorrhagic fever that spread like wildfire through all cross-sections of the population, sending dying people lurching into the street within a few hours of infection, moaning and bleeding from their eyes, there would be no controversy. We wouldn't have antivaxxers making up all kinds of ridiculous reasons to avoid the shot, we wouldn't have state governors suing the President or vice versa, and we wouldn't think twice about yanking the broadcast licenses of any Fox or Sinclair affiliates who spread misinformation or otherwise spewed propaganda against best public health practices. We would have something to unite against, rather than something to further divide us. But that's not what happened. The bug is bad but not that bad. It "almost never" kills children, it targets "old" or "fat" people disproportionately, and it "only" kills about 1% of patients. It is bad enough to bring out the worst differences among us, but not bad enough to make us set those differences aside. If an enemy nation sent troops to our shores with orders to kill even 0.1% of our population, we'd all rise up to defeat them... but somehow a virus is different. The virus gets a free pass from 30%-40% of our population which is strongly (but admittedly not exclusively) correlated with a specific political party. Makes no sense, but then, not much does these days.

sneak 5y ago
It's just below the danger threshold that would disqualify it for use as a political weapon. 2000 jumbo jets full of dead USians (and counting!) is below that threshold, which is sort of amazing to believe. Human life is cheap to partisans there, apparently.
tdeck 5y ago
> If we were dealing with some kind of hemorrhagic fever that spread like wildfire through all cross-sections of the population, sending dying people lurching into the street within a few hours of infection, moaning and bleeding from their eyes, there would be no controversy. Are we sure about that? Scientific measures to control Ebola met with great resistance when they seemed to go against local cultural practices in Africa [1]. While cultural practices in the U.S. are different, I would expect some resistance here too. > The bug is bad but not that bad. It "almost never" kills children, it targets "old" or "fat" people disproportionately Interestingly these are demographics that seem to be somewhat over-represented in Florida given how many retirees move there. [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4709130/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4709130/

dstaley 5y ago

I'm curious if this ruling would have any impact on a district's ability to enforce a uniform policy/dress code. If a district doesn't have the authority to require masks, how can they have the authority to require that students tuck in their shirts?

notimetorelax 5y ago
Governor explicitly prohibited mandating wearing masks. He did not prohibit mandating dress code.
- dstaley 5y ago
  Right, but the executive order issued doesn't usurp the authority of a school district to require a dress code, and as such masks could technically still be required under that authority. I believe this is what's happening in some Texas schools as well.
  - mod 5y ago
    I read that was happening in some Florida counties (I read it about a month ago, right as school began there). I didn't hear how it had gone over with the governor. I think if you say "we won't fund you if you mandate masks," the mechanism for mandating them probably isn't very relevant. Mandating masks via dress code policy is still mandating masks.

supratims 5y ago

FFS, does everything need to go to the courts...