Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis told reporters Monday that public schools will remain open despite the parabolic rise in COVID-19 cases, according to AP News. 

DeSantis strongly argued against lockdowns and stated they do not work:  

“Closing schools due to coronavirus is probably the biggest public health blunder in modern American history,” the governor said at a news conference.

“People who advocate closing schools for virus mitigation are effectively today’s flat-earthers.”

DeSantis said the state’s public school system would remain open while pointing out countries like Sweden, Denmark, Germany, and Switzerland all kept children in schools despite the rapid spread of the virus in their respective countries, adding that these European countries kept their schools open without negative consequences. 

The governor pointed out the rise in cases in the state, though he said other states have it worse.   

“We’ve seen cases increase but look at all the other states that are seeing them increase way, way more,” DeSantis said.

“If you look at the per-capita hospitalizations, we are not even close to the top of the stuff. So I think people should put it in perspective.”

His comments come as Dr. Michael Osterholm, who serves as director of the Center of Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, and is the latest “scientist” to join Joe Biden “special coronavirus transition advisory team,” recently supported a “nationwide lockdown” to drive down the number of new cases. 

A nationwide lockdown would drive the number of new cases and hospitalizations down to manageable levels while the world awaits a vaccine, Osterholm told Yahoo Finance on Wednesday.

“We could pay for a package right now to cover all of the wages, lost wages for individual workers for losses to small companies to medium-sized companies or city, state, county governments. We could do all of that,” he said. “If we did that, then we could lockdown for four-to-six weeks.”

There’s just one thing… as De Santis notes more vociferously than most, the real ‘science’ – where actual experiments are undergone, results noted, and theses concluded – shows that lockdowns do not work…

But as JPMorgan noted in a detailed study, there are no meaningful curve development differences between countries with and without strong curve intervention.

This makes the bank question if existing public health intervention (i.e., lockdown/ stricter social distancing) should remain in place next year, and leads JPM to conclude that “public health policy should consider approaches biased towards economic/pubic mental health over the urge to close the curve in 2021.”

To reach its “startling” conclusion, JPMorgan compared countries without lockdown, keeping the economy open under certain levels of social-distancing (Brazil, US, Sweden, Japan, Korea) to countries with strong curve intervention (UK, Germany, Italy, France, China, India) to see any meaningful differential in the curve development.

This outcome suggests that COVID-19 follows a similar diffusion and development process of other infectious diseases with certain life cycles. Therefore, JPMorgan would argue that public health policy should consider a bit more biased approach on economic/pubic mental health over the aim to close the infection curve in 2021 as lockdowns could be costly to the economy.

JPMorgan’s conclusion: “Keeping public activities open and tracing susceptible people leveraging technology looks to have better risk reward to us.” 

To further DeSantis’ point, a recent study in The Lancet found no correlation between the severity of lockdown and the number of covid deaths. 

On Sunday, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony Fauci told ABC’s “This Week” that children should be kept in school and the spread of the virus pandemic among children “is not really very big at all.” 

There’s enough evidence that supports schools should remain open – though Democrats continue their calls to lock down everything.