Today’s entry: Hi Brian, I am wondering if politics are preventing Florida from being removed from the New York state restricted list. According to the guidance published by the NYS Dept of Health, removal criteria is "Criteria for Designating States with Significant Community Spread” All travelers entering New York who have recently traveled within a state with either: • a positive test rate higher than 10 per 100,000 residents over a seven-day rolling average; or • a testing positivity rate of higher than a 10% over a seven-day rolling average". Am I missing something? Florida has not had a 10% positivity rate since Aug 12, and that was due to the "dump" of data. So is this the Dictator in Chief of NYS leveraging his dislike toward our governor??
Bottom Line: It’s understandable to suspect politics may be playing a role in how New York and its neighbors are handling Floridians. An unprecedented pandemic met with unprecedented shutdowns with an ongoing policy response that’s being made up on the fly during a Presidential election cycle. In this particular instance, however, I don’t think Florida is being singled out by New York for purely political reasons.
The “Restricted List” is a partnership between Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York. All travelers from states or territories on the restricted list, have imposed a 14-day quarantine upon arrival in any of those three states. As you cited, the baseline measurement they pegged to the restricted list is a rolling weekly average for positivity rates of 10% or higher. Florida hasn’t had an average positivity rate that high since the second week of August. So, what gives?
There are currently 31 states/US territories on the Tri-state restricted list. Of the 27 states on the list, 16 have Republican Governors and 11 are led by Democrats. In addition, all territories like Puerto Rico, which are on the list govern to the left. In other words, there’s a near-even political split represented on the restricted list. But back to the question of why Florida would be on the list since we’ve been below their stated threshold hold for three weeks at this point? I suspect like most public policy espoused during this pandemic, be it in South Florida or the northeast, they’re just making it up on the go and there’s a chance Florida will be one of the last states off of the restricted list.
This is mostly because Florida’s population-adjusted testing is 25th nationally, right at average. Plus, Florida is third in overall cases, second in population-adjusted cases, and currently has the most active cases in the country.
Now, to be clear, I’m not agreeing with the approach of the restricted list but to the extent, one exists, and politicians are making up policy as they go, it’s likely Florida would be on that list. The only state with population-adjusted totals higher than Florida’s is Louisiana, which incidentally is led by a Democrat governor and is on New York’s restricted list. Though I don’t know this to be the case, I suspect many officials who’ve pegged outcomes to the positivity rate realize how absurd that metric is at this stage of the pandemic. Who goes to get tested for the heck of it? Since just about the only people who still get tested are those who are sick with something or those who came in contact with someone who tested positive, the number of tests being taken has plummeted. Loosely, the only thing the positivity rate is still measuring, is how many people who are sick with something are sick with COVID-19. As for those who do still use the positivity rate for decision making, maybe the next TikTok challenge should be something constructive, like getting tested to drive down the positivity rate to a level so low it’d illustrate the absurdity of using such a subjective metric to keep schools and businesses closed and Floridians quarantined.
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