Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) has clashed with public health experts over the course of the coronavirus pandemic. One major point is that DeSantis thinks that contact tracing was ineffective, but experts claim it was never fully incorporated into the COVID-19 response.
The Tampa Bay Times reported Tuesday that DeSantis and his advisers attacked the contact tracing plan, but the state of Florida is still paying millions to use a contact tracing app that isn't being used.
"The developer of the app, Twenty Labs, has received $4 million from Florida so far, according to the state's online contracts database," reported the Times. "The latest installment of $200,000 was paid on March 12 — a few days before DeSantis said contact tracing was an ineffective strategy."
The app, "Healthy Together," is an app that was designed by the son of a top Republican donor and Palm Beach billionaire with ties to DeSantis.
"But a year into the pandemic, there has been little oversight or accounting of how DeSantis spent the money and even fewer answers as to why certain companies were tapped for state work," said the report. "Department of Health spokesman Jason Mahon did not respond to questions about how Twenty Labs was chosen to build Healthy Together and why it was picked over other companies."
Then there's the matter of contact tracing being an afterthought, despite being the oldest method of controlling an outbreak. But contact tracing would mean that there would be an accurate accounting of everyone who had the coronavirus and where the emerging hotspots are. That could conflict with the numbers coming out of the DeSantis office and scare possible tourists.
After the CARES Act passed, Florida used some of the money to fund contact tracers at county health departments. According to the report, however, critics said the attempts were disorganized and underfunded. It only took a few months for the staff to be completely overwhelmed with a flood of new cases and. DeSantis claimed recently that the attempts to trace were far too great for them. The GOP governor's hand-picked "experts" confirmed the claim, saying it was "counterproductive" and "the wrong strategy."
"To think that it can be used for a pandemic is naive to the max," said Harvard Medical School's Martin Kulldorff.
University of Florida's Tom Hladish, who serves as a research scientist at the Emerging Pathogens Institute, explained that Florida never actually made an honest attempt to make it work.
"It's like showing up to a house on fire with a squirt gun and saying water doesn't put out fires," Hladish said. "You didn't do it right in the first place."
