Florida teachers have a message for Gov. Ron DeSantis: We’re not going back to the classroom in the midst of a coronavirus pandemic until it’s safe for everyone.
For a second day in a row, lawyers for the Florida Education Association clashed Thursday with the governor’s lawyers over plans to restore staff education at the end of the month.
While the question of when and how I would resume schooling would continue to be debated across the country and more universities canceling lessons and sending students home amid a spike in new cases, the virtual face-off in Tallahassee took a day off Florida a new urgency on recorded its 10,000th coronavirus death – and because the state came ever closer to California as one of the states with 600,000 or more confirmed COVID-19 cases.
As of Thursday morning, Florida had reported 584,047 cases and 10,066 deaths since the start of the pandemic, the latest NBC News tally showed. In the last seven days, Florida officials reported 26,910 new cases and 1,020 more deaths, which was a decline in the previous week.
Attorneys for the FEA used those horrific bills to try to persuade a Leon County judge to stop the state’s order to end school districts by the end of August.
“We believe we have committed a convincing case to protect students and the people who work at our schools,” FEA Vice President Andrew Spar said in a statement Wednesday after the first day of the legal battle without compromise some.
Attorney David Wells spoke for the state, saying the Florida Constitution requires schools to provide students with high-quality education and the best way to ensure that is through “face-to-face learning,” The Tampa Bay Times reported.
The FEA’s lawsuit is supported by the NAACP.
“The reckless threat posed by our children in Florida is highly unacceptable and irresponsible,” said Adora Obi Nweze, president of the organization’s Florida State Conference. “We need to send a message to Gov. DeSantis that we will not unnecessarily expose children, families and communities to Covid-19.”
Most of Florida’s new cases and deaths have occurred since DeSantis, at the urging of President Donald Trump, began reopening the state in May. At that point, the pandemic, which had already hit the Northeast hard and killed thousands of people, was just beginning to take hold in the Sunshine State.
“We have not seen an explosion of new cases,” DeSantis said on April 29, the same day he signed an executive order to open Florida after less than two months in quarantine.
Texas, another state that listens to Trump, is also on track to join California in the 600,000 business club, figures from NBC News show. The state has repaired 81,308 cases in the past two weeks and has now reported a total of 582,709 cases and more than 11,000 deaths.
Trump, who has been criticized for reacting too slowly to the crisis, the danger of backwardness and printing false or misleading information about the progress of the pandemic, declared no national emergency until March 13.
Nationally, the number of confirmed cases of coronavirus was more than 5.5 million and the death toll as of Thursday morning was more than 174,000, NBC News numbers showed. The US, which leads the world in both categories, has accounted for about a quarter of the nearly 22.5 million cases and more than a fifth of the 789,000 deaths worldwide.
In other developments:
- There were more worrying signs that the recovery of the US economy from the devastation of the pandemic was halting. Economist had expected weekly unemployment claims to fall from 963,000 to 920,000. Instead, 1,106 million people filed for initial unemployment claims last week, the Department of Labor reported Thursday. More than 23 million jobs were lost when the pandemic hit. The unemployment rate was a healthy 4.8 percent when Trump took on President Barack Obama’s giant in January 2017 and plunged as low as 3.5 percent in the following months. It is now at 10.2 percent, according to the latest statistics from the Federal Labor Department.
- The Hoboken City Council, New Jersey, said no to a measure that would penalize people with fines of $ 250 or more if they were caught outside without wearing a mask against COVID-19. “It’s a bit of an overkill on our part and I’m wearing a mask,” said councilor Ruben Ramos, jr. Wednesday after the council voted the measure 6-3. “We are putting our policemen and the people who would be enforcing this in a very difficult decision that I do not want to place them.” It remains to be seen if there is any blowback from the public. Before the vote, more than half of the 3,000 surveyed in this full-fledged small town on the Hudson River from Manhattan said they favored beating mask-refuseniks with hefty fines.
- U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana, tested positive for COVID-19 on Thursday. His office said he took the test “after being notified yesterday that he had been exposed to an individual with coronavirus.” Cassidy, who is a doctor, said he will be quarantined for 14 days. He is the second senator to catch the break. The other was Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who is also a Republican as a doctor. Paul recovered but angry at some of his colleagues by refusing to wear a mask. “I have immunity,” he said. Nine representatives also tested positive.
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Five members of the University of Notre Dame football team tested positive for COVID-19 and six others were ordered to quarantine just days after school officials closed two weeks in class. Meanwhile, the University of North Carolina said it will also move undergraduate classes online Monday. The reason? At least three clusters of COVID-19 infections have been discovered in the last two days “that can be traced” to frat parties, the school said in a statement. Thousands of other schools have decided to either suspend personal training or go online for the rest of the semester because the number of Covid cases has exploded since students returned to campus.
Joe Murphy contributed.
