Governor Ron DeSantis speaking with attendees at the 2021 Student Action Summit hosted by Turning Point USA at the Tampa Convention Center in Tampa, Florida. / Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons
The corporate media outlets that bashed southern, often Republican-led states during the Delta-variant surge of COVID-19 are now silent as hospitalizations are falling in the south and have risen in the north.
The total number of hospitalized patients with COVID-19 in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Region 4, which consists of Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida, is down more than 73% since Sept. 1, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In HHS Region 3 (Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia and Virginia), hospitalizations surged almost 1,000% from late-July to late-September, and have hardly fallen since.
During the Delta wave, some media outlets repeatedly heaped blame on southern states for driving the surge. CNN emphasized that eight states made up half of COVID-19 hospitalizations. MSNBC wrote that Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was beginning to “lose the plot.” CBS News said, “Hospitals in Southern states are pushed to the brink.”
New York now has more than double Florida’s rate of new COVID cases per 100,000.
— Abe Greenwald (@AbeGreenwald) October 18, 2021
The south did experience a harsh Delta wave. HHS Region 4 saw an increase in hospitalized patients of 955% from July 1 to Sep. 1. In HHS Region 6 (Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arkansas and Louisiana), the surge was over 700%. But both those regions have seen hospitalizations plummet back toward pre-Delta levels in the weeks since. (RELATED: COVID-19 Looks To Be On The Way Out, So Why Aren’t The Restrictions?)
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