Crisis.
I don’t instantly grasp why bars would be barred from in-house service but not restaurants. It has to do with age, presumably. Florida’s cases of COVID-19 have been trending younger, proof that it’s young adults who have been most cavalier about social distancing since the state reopened. If you want to give that group a reason to stay home instead of socializing en masse, your next move is simple: Shut down bars — or at least force them to provide takeout service only, as is happening here. Like Greg Abbott in Texas, Ron DeSantis is grasping for the least intrusive means of tamping down the current outbreak. A total lockdown is unthinkable (for the moment) but doing nothing is unthinkable as well given the increasing scale of the outbreak in Florida. So he’s going to shut in-house service at bars and hope young adults take the hint to stop going out.
Except… won’t they just go to restaurants and drink there? And isn’t that actually more dangerous potentially since they’re likely to mix with an older cohort inside restaurants?
Gotta try something, though. If this doesn’t work, restaurants are surely next.
Effective immediately, the Department of Business and Professional Regulation is suspending on premises consumption of alcohol at bars statewide.
Florida DBPR (@FloridaDBPR) June 26, 2020
Why the drastic action today? It’s because the latest case count is especially gory.
A record week of surging coronavirus numbers was only heightened on Friday, as state health officials confirmed 8,942 cases, nearly doubling the previous record of cases reported in a single day, two days earlier.
Florida’s Department of Health on Friday morning confirmed the cases, bringing the state total to 122,960. The state also announced at least 137 new deaths, bringing the total of COVID-19 deaths north of 3,400.
Over the last seven days, Florida has reported 29,163 new cases. That’s nearly a quarter of all the confirmed cases in the state so far.
If you want to see what that looks like in graph form, feast your eyes. Not great. Florida’s rolling seven-day average of new cases is now around seven times higher than it was on May 4, when the state began reopening.
But there are caveats.
