One of my ongoing complaints in this crisis has been the extent to which state health departments have had to mostly go their own way in determining how to move out of a shutdown state and get people back to business and school and life.
This is something that I’ve always felt would be a clear role for the CDC, to have a clean set of guidance and then help states and counties track their movement through each phase of re-opening.
That has not happened and we instead have a hodgepodge of policies, guidance, and requirements and a vast range of what different states either ask or demand of their citizens. Within this range, people will certainly disagree, but my very strongly held opinion is that we need to be respectful of each other and the fact that there continue to be a wide range of options. The people who prefer higher caution from their governments are not cowardly totalitarians and the people who prefer to open things up are not sentencing people to death.
Keep in mind that the correlation between a state’s opening policies and it’s COVID numbers is not particularly strong. Some states that have kept things locked down have found that their policies are not making the impact they had hoped. Some states that are more open have found better results.
Washington’s Suspended Animation
Florida’s Opening Preference
Because Reasons
Disney Shorts: Egyptian Melodies
Washington’s Suspended Animation
Two months ago, Governor Inslee suspended all phase movement in Washington indefinitely. Since then, some states have moved from “Phase 1” to “Modified Phase 1” but everyone else is stuck in whichever phase they were in on July 28th.
For my county, that meant that playgrounds were closed throughout the summer. When I wrote to my town about it, they responded that they were helpless against the state’s edicts. No schools in my district have opened and there is not really any timeline on when they might open. Libraries are, in theory, open for outdoor pickup but, in practice, people are just keeping their books since all fines have been suspended until December.
There is no guidance from the state on when we can move forward and no expectations that things will change. Why is this? From my perspective, state officials became so frustrated that they could not control COVID infections through policy that they simply gave up. They decided that no one could blame them for things getting worse if they simply stopping doing things entirely. And today we enter month three of a state government that just threw up their hands and gave up on trying to fix anything.
But there is an interesting twist to this story because my town finally gave up on waiting for the state government to tell them what to do with their parks. The parks that have been closed since March are finally open, in contradiction with the state guidelines.

This did not make news, no one got outraged, and no one accused anyone else of trying to make people sick. Everyone who thinks the playgrounds are still too dangerous is not there and everyone who is comfortable with taking their kids to the playground is there. It’s as simple as people making their own risk determinations and balancing the risks against the benefits.
Florida’s Opening Preference
Since early in this crisis, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has made it clear that his preference is for having things as open as possible. He came under enormous criticism for this even when Florida had very low rates of COVID positives in May. The summer COVID surge in Florida was seen by many as a direct result of the decision to loosen restrictions.
Side Note: I’m skeptical of that assessment since Southern California saw a similar infection curve even though they did not open up.
Nevertheless, since July, Florida’s cases number have decreased substantially and this last week Governor DeSantis announced that Florida was moving into Phase 3, which removes state restrictions on restaurants and bars as well as removing restrictions on large venues as long as they follow “adequate sanitation” and “limited social distancing protocols”.
One interesting note to this is that Florida is limiting how much a local town or county may restrict their local businesses. They can still limit seating in restaurants and bars to 50% capacity but require a waiver to restrict it any further. Of course, private businesses can do whatever they want.
When this was announced, a number of people got really upset. I hesitate to even highlight some of the ugliness that I’ve seen, but more than a few of them have claimed that DeSantis is going to get people killed or that Florida is inevitably going to see an infection surge in response to this phase change.
This is, in my opinion, tactless and unfair. Florida’s Phase 3 is very similar to Virginia’s Phase 3, which they have been in since July. Virginia saw a small surge over the summer but their numbers over the past few weeks are about the same as Florida. There is no real reason to demand that Florida meets a higher standard than other states that have reopened and no reason to think that DeSantis is doing this out of a sense of reckless abandon. He has stated that he wants to address “business certainty” and allow venues to know that they will be able to operate with at least 50% capacity.
In this I’m going to return to a refrain that I’ve been singing since this began: We need to show grace. There are a lot of options when it comes to protecting ourselves and our communities from COVID and a lot of options on the appropriate ways to open our towns and cities for business. This cannot be “my way or the highway”, we cannot turn every variation on a theme of phased reopening as if it a is life and death decision made by either cowards or monsters.
Because Reasons

I’ve been arguing (foolishly) on the internet for a long time and there is a rhetorical strategy that I call “because reasons”. The core of this strategy is that Team Bad (whatever group we don’t like) is doing something we don’t like. Then someone points out that Team Good (a group we do like) has done something similar. We could, in theory, say “I’m going to have to think about that” and close the laptop but what we do instead is search through the two situations looking for any distinction, any difference between these two cases and, whatever that distinction happens to be, we decide that it is that marginal reason that make Team Bad very specifically bad while Team Good is actually blameless. The actual difference doesn’t matter, what matters is that there IS a difference that we can hang the morality of the case on.
People will inevitably hang the entire weight of their argument on whatever paper-thin differentiation there is between the two cases. My team gets off the hook because reasons.
That is what I’ve seen in the responses to Florida’s movement to Phase 3. There is not, to my knowledge, any indication whatsoever that seating people in restaurants at a 25% capacity (which would require a waiver) makes a substantial spread difference than seating people at 50% capacity (which a town or county may do at their discretion). But people insist that this small difference makes all the difference in the world when we talk about how Florida is messing things up while Virginia is doing the right thing.
In the end, though, this is a lack of grace. As we move through this, there will be places and people that we think are being too careful or not careful enough. We can either turn that into a culture war and accuse them of bad faith / stupidity / carelessness / lack of empathy and compassion… or we can recognize that there really are a range of options in dealing with this crisis.
In my ideal world (which does not now nor will it ever exist), we would have a firm grasp on the numbers and think hard about what numbers we think justify what policies. Then we would hold those policies in our head and widen the rage of acceptable policy a little further than we’re comfortable with. Then we would apply that range to everyone. We would apply it to the governor that of our state, even if the national news never yells at him for his decision making. And we would apply that same range of acceptable policy to the governor who everyone is yelling at on twitter today.
Disney Shorts: Egyptian Melodies
This is a very early Silly Symphony only about three years after Steamboat Willie and it is just remarkable what the animation team is experimenting with in this short.
On the surface, this is just another morose Silly Symphony similar to the very first one (The Skeleton Dance). In this, a spider infiltrates the sphynx and disturbs the slumber of four mummies before the action moves to some hieroglyphic antics on the walls.
But the animation experimentation in this short is really cool. As the spider enters the tomb, we get a first-person perspective moving through a tunnel. This would have been very difficult to animate since every inch of the screen is changing every second.

They even have the camera follow the spider around the corners and down the stairs with this first person perspective. It seems clear that they thought this perspective strategy might be cool to see if it would work out. It’s interesting enough but my guess was that it was a little too gimmicky for them to take the lessons learned here and apply them in any future shorts.
Honestly though, when it comes to being "people making their own risk determinations and balancing the risks against the benefits," there's much more political attention given to restricting people making "bad," or at least riskier, decisions, and not enough attention to the other side: enabling or subsidizing making safe decisions. Suspending library fines, suspending in-person school attendance, limiting rent obligations, the Trump Bucks, and suchlike are good moves, but as things reopen, these concessions are going to go away along with the restrictions that chafe so many. If that happened, it would not only merely allow the riskier behaviors we restricted, but actually *incentivizing* them somewhat.
For example, if I'm someone very concerned about the disease, I can choose to stay home all summer as long as I have nothing compelling me to leave.. but if schools open up and rent gets collected again, I'm going to have to send my kids to school and return to work AGAINST my better judgement, because I'll be punished by the state otherwise.
Politicians tend to resort to blanket restrictions and bans, maybe because it reads easier, but then forget the carrot works too. Maybe better, depending on the situation.