The superintendent of the largest school district in Florida tried to impose the obligation to wear face masks on Wednesday, in the latest chapter of a political battle for the coronavirus in the south of United States, where most infections occur.
The superintendent Alberto Carvalho of Miami-Dade County Public Schools sought school board approval Wednesday to require a majority of the district’s 360,000 students to cover their faces, in defiance of the governor’s ban Ron DeSantis to require face masks.
“I’m going to go to my own school board meeting and I’m going to do what is right, fair and upright,” he told a state Department of Education meeting early Wednesday.
The governor signed a decree last month that prohibits local officials from imposing mask requirements. Like other Republicans, DeSantis has called its use a personal choice that, in the case of students, parents must make.
The Board of Education of the state voted unanimously Tuesday to punish the counties of Broward Y Alachua for imposing face masks on schools in defiance of the governor’s order, local media reported.
They are the first to be punished, although no concrete measures have been taken, local media said.
More than 1,000 deaths daily
The deaths from Covid-19 in the United States hit a five-month high on Tuesday as state and local officials argued over the demands for face masks across the South, as the highly contagious variant Delta it spread.
More than 1,000 people were reported dead on Tuesday, the most in a day since March, after the death toll from the virus soared over the past month to a daily average of 769, according to a Reuters tally. .
The spread of the Delta variant has disrupted the new school year in some southern states and pushed new cases in the United States to a six-month high, averaging more than 100,000 a day in the past 12 days, according to the count.
In Tampa, Florida, nearly 5,600 students and more than 300 employees from a single school district remained in isolation or quarantine Wednesday after being infected or exposed to Covid-19.
Florida was the third state in the country with the highest number of new coronavirus infections last week, while Texas, where the governor Greg Abbott he has also disagreed with some local officials over the use of the masks, was the twelfth, according to a Reuters tally.
The top 10 states with the most new cases are all in the south.
Vaccines protect people from serious illness, hospitalizations and death after contracting the coronavirus, but vaccinated people can still become infected and transmit it, public health officials have said.
