Ron DeSantis Expected to Announce Plan to Reopen Florida Gyms: ‘You Can Be Active and Be Safe’

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is expected to announce Friday that gyms in parts of the state may reopen during the coronavirus pandemic.

“I think if you do sanitation, first of all, this is a virus that if you’re in good shape, you’re probably gonna be okay. So why would we want to dissuade people from going to be in shape?” the governor said Thursday during a press briefing in Doral.

DeSantis continued:

So we’ll have an announcement on that tomorrow, but I think it’s really important that people have access to gym and to different exercise. The data on this is overwhelming. If you look in some of these jurisdictions, under 65 it’s like, 90 plus percent of the folks under 65 that have had fatalities have had serious conditions and many of that has been tied to obesity.

So, let’s tell people to get out, do those things. That’s one of the reasons why I always promoted outdoor activity. A lot of people said ‘Oh my gosh, how could you have people golf or do this or do that.’ The fact of the matter is outdoors is our friend. You know, getting out and doing things there. The transmission is much more efficient in enclosed environments.

So Florida has nice weather, We should take advantage of that. We’ve had golf courses running outside of southeast Florida the whole time. The villages, the retirement community in central Florida, they had like, record tee sheets. There’s zero people from the villages in that UF hospital in the villages right now. So clearly, you can be active and be safe. There’s no problem doing that. But we’re going to have an announcement tomorrow that’s gonna encompass the gyms.

At the press briefing, the governor granted Broward and Miami-Dade counties’ requests to reopen after they prepared guidelines to begin the process as soon as Monday, according to Breitbart News.

“Today, we take another important step for a very important part of the state of Florida. Some of our absolute best economic engines are in communities throughout South Florida,” DeSantis noted.

Also on Thursday, Politico said the Republican governor “looks more right than those who criticized the Sunshine State’s coronavirus response,” adding that media bias was one reason he was polling worse than New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D).

“Cuomo also has something else DeSantis doesn’t: a press that defers to him, one that preferred to cover ‘Florida Morons’ at the beach (where it’s relatively hard to get infected) over New Yorkers riding cramped subway cars (where it’s easy to get infected),” the bulletin concluded.