Florida has obscured the true extent of its COVID-19 pandemic by using a misleading measure of positive cases to justify reopening schools and businesses, state data indicates. 

While Florida has publicized that its “positivity rate” has regularly fallen below 5%, other health organizations are publishing data that shows the rate may be dramatically higher.  Independent experts, including Johns Hopkins University, consistently list Florida’s positivity rate at 10% or higher, twice the recommended level for widespread reopening. 

Florida itself calculates another version of the rate — not widely publicized — that shows the pandemic is worse than state officials have championed. Those figures show that the rate has never fallen to the 5% threshold, the South Florida Sun Sentinel discovered.

The result: As coronavirus cases again threaten to rise in Florida, with schools and businesses fully open, it is becoming increasingly difficult to answer a simple question: What percentage of people tested positive for COVID-19 on any given day — and are we justified in going about our business without worry? Or did Gov. Ron DeSantis put people at risk when he allowed businesses to return to normal?

On this day in history October 20th, we recognize and pay tribute to suffragette (a woman seeking the right to vote through organized protest) Alice Paul, who began a seven month jail sentence for protesting for women’s rights back on October 20th 1917. 

The arrested suffragists were sent to a prison in Virginia. Paul and her compatriots demanded to be treated as political prisoners and staged hunger strikes. Their demands were met with brutality as suffragists, including frail, older women, were beaten, pushed and thrown into cold, unsanitary, and rat-infested cells.  Arrests continued and conditions at the prison deteriorated.  For staging hunger strikes, Paul and several other suffragists were forcibly fed in a tortuous method.  Prison officials removed Paul to a sanitarium in hopes of getting her declared insane.  When news of the prison conditions and hunger strikes became known, the press, some politicians, and the public began demanding the women’s release; sympathy for the prisoners brought many to support the cause of women’s suffrage.  Upon her release from prison, Paul hoped to ride this surge of goodwill into victory.

In 1919, both the House and Senate passed the 19th Amendment and the battle for state ratification commenced. Three-fourths of the states were needed to ratify the amendment. The battle for ratification came down to the state of Tennessee in the summer of 1920; if a majority of the state legislature voted for the amendment, it would become law. The deciding vote was cast twenty-four year-old Harry Burn, the youngest member of the Tennessee assembly. Originally intending to vote “no,” Burn changed his vote after receiving a telegram from his mother asking him to support women’s suffrage. On August 18, 1920, Tennessee ratified the 19th Amendment. Six days later, Secretary of State Colby certified the ratification, and, with the stroke of his pen, American women gained the right to vote. 

For more information on Alice Paul and the suffragette movement, visit www.alicepaul.org or search for “Alice Paul” on www.sharemylesson.org, a great, totally free, resource for lessons and study materials that educators and parents should know about.