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Teachers in Florida have a message for Governor Ron DeSantis: We will not be returning to classrooms in the midst of a coronavirus pandemic until it is safe for everyone.
For a second day in a row, attorneys for the Florida Education Association clashed with attorneys for the governor on Thursday over plans to resume in-person teaching by the end of the month.
As the question of when and how to resume school continued to be debated across the country, and more universities were canceling classes and sending students home amid a surge in new cases, the virtual confrontation in Tallahassee took on new urgency a day after Florida. recorded its 10,000th death from the coronavirus – and as the state moved closer and closer to joining California as one of the states with 600,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 or more.
As of Thursday morning, Florida had reported 584,047 cases and 10,066 deaths since the start of the pandemic, according to the latest count from NBC News. In the past seven days, Florida health officials reported 26,910 new cases and 1,020 more deaths, down from the week before.
FEA attorneys used this horrible arithmetic to try to convince a Leon County judge to stop the state order requiring school districts to resume classroom instruction at the end of August.
“We believe we have presented a compelling case to protect students and those who work in our schools,” FEA Vice President Andrew Spar said in a statement Wednesday after the first day of the battle ended. legal without compromise.
Complaining for the state, attorney David Wells said that the Florida Constitution requires schools to provide students with a high quality education and that the best way to ensure this is through “face-to-face learning.” reported the Tampa Bay Times.
The FEA lawsuit is supported by the NAACP.
“The reckless endangerment of our children across Florida is completely unacceptable and irresponsible,” said Adora Obi Nweze, president of the organization’s Florida State Conference. “We need to send a message to the DeSantis government that we will not allow children, families and communities to be unnecessarily exposed to Covid-19.”
Most of the new cases and deaths in Florida have been since DeSantis, at the behest of President Donald Trump, began reopening the state in May. By then, the pandemic, which had already hit the Northeast hard and killed thousands, was just beginning to be felt in Sun State.
“We haven’t seen an explosion of new cases,” DeSantis said on April 29, the same day he signed an executive order to reopen Florida after less than two months of quarantine.
Texas, another state that has listened to Trump, is also on track to join California in the 600,000 case club, according to NBC News figures. The state has accumulated 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 responding too slowly to the crisis, downplaying his danger and spreading false or misleading information about the progress of the pandemic, did not declare a national emergency until March 13.
Nationwide, the number of confirmed coronavirus cases was over 5.5 million and the death toll as of Thursday morning was over 174,000, according to NBC News figures. The United States, which dominates the world in both categories, 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 ravages of the pandemic was stagnating. The economist expected weekly jobless claims to rise from 963,000 to 920,000. Instead, 1.106 million people filed an initial jobless claim last week, the Labor Ministry reported Thursday. More than 23 million jobs were lost when the pandemic struck. The unemployment rate was 4.8% when Trump took over from President Barack Obama in January 2017 and has fallen as low as 3.5% in the months since. It is now at 10.2%, according to the latest statistics from the Federal Ministry of Labor.
- Hoboken, New Jersey City Council has said no to a measure that would fine people $ 250 or more if caught outside without wearing a COVID-19 mask. “It’s a little excessive on our part and I’m in favor of wearing a mask,” Councilor Ruben Ramos Jr. said Wednesday after the board voted against the measure by a 6-3 vote. “We are putting our police officers and the people who would apply this into a very difficult decision that I don’t want to put them in place.” It remains to be seen if there will be a public backlash. Ahead of the vote, more than half of the 3,000 people polled in this crowded small town across the Hudson River from Manhattan said they’d rather slap masked refuseniks with hefty fines.
- US Senator Bill Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana, tested positive for COVID-19 on Thursday. His office said he took the test “after being told last night that he had been exposed to someone with coronavirus.” Cassidy, who is a doctor, said he would be quarantined for 14 days. He is the second senator to catch the virus. The other was Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who is also a Republican and a physician. Paul recovered but angered some of his colleagues by refusing to wear a mask afterwards. “I have immunity,” he says. Nine representatives also tested positive.
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Five members of the University of Notre Dame football team have tested positive for COVID-19 and six others have been ordered to quarantine just days after school officials interrupted classroom instruction for two weeks. Meanwhile, North Carolina State University said it was also moving undergraduate courses online from Monday. The reason? At least three clusters of COVID-19 infections have been discovered in the past two days “which can be attributed” to fraternity parties, the school said in a statement. Dozens of other schools have made the decision to suspend in-person teaching or go online for the remainder of the semester as the number of Covid cases has skyrocketed since students returned to campus.
Joe murphy contributed.
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