The current, daily record-breaking surge of the coronavirus is concentrated in, but not limited to, southern states that did not take the virus seriously earlier this year when New York saw the worst of it.
But it's not the south's lack of leadership that is the problem, Trump's CDC director Robert Redfield said during an interview with the The Journal of the American Medical Association yesterday.
Although he promptly undercut his own argument, Redfield says this is all the fault of those damn yankees.
Independent of state reopening plans, "we're of the view that there was something else that was the driver. Maybe the Memorial Day, not weekend, but the Memorial Day week, where a lot of Northerners decided to go South for vacations."
Because the South hadn't yet experienced large outbreaks like the Northeast, many Southern states and cities reopened bars and gyms early and didn't require people to wear masks or to practice social distancing "that seriously," Redfield said. Once the virus was introduced in those areas, that could have allowed it to spread quickly.
They didn't take it "that seriously," he says, but it's still someone else's fault!
In a country with no national response coordinated by the federal government, it is indeed possible that "Northerners" traveled south and carried with the virus with them, but the reverse is also possible. States were explicitly told to fend for themselves and develop their own plans and response. In some cases that included quarantine for out-of-state travelers, but for most it didn't.
In any case, Northerners did not elect a mouth-breathing idiot like Ron DeSantis as the governor of Florida, for example, and they are not responsible for the Republican party's obsession with Freedumb. It's not as if no one warned mostly Republican governors that they were making a big mistake.
Even the Grim Reaper tried to warn them.