RUTHFULLY YOURS

With Gov. Ron DeSantis preparing to start reopening the state on Monday, epidemiologists and others are asking: What happened? Was Florida smart or lucky?

The answer may be a bit of both. Mr. DeSantis restricted visitation to nursing homes but he left early lockdown decisions to local authorities. Mayors in some hard-hit large communities shut down faster and more aggressively than the state, gaining valuable time.

Walt Disney World closed two weeks before the statewide order. Spring breakers, who packed Florida beaches and bars until mid-March, went back home. Some scientists point to Florida’s low population density, while others to its subtropical climate to explain fewer infections.

A key factor, many say, is a change in the behavior of Floridians. Though the governor didn’t impose a statewide stay-at-home order until April 3, people began hunkering down en masse in mid-March, according to firms that analyze anonymous cellphone data.

That was around the same time deaths in the U.S. topped 100 and residents of New York, many of whom have ties to Florida, started staying home. The pandemic’s progression in Florida was about a week behind its trajectory in New York, so that social-distancing measures effectively kicked in earlier, said Thomas Hladish, research scientist at the University of Florida Emerging Pathogens Institute.

Florida had 6 deaths per 100,000 people as of Saturday, compared with 42 in Louisiana, 56 in Massachusetts and 97 in New York, according to states’ data.

California had 5 deaths per 100,000 people and Texas had 3.

The seven-day average of new cases in Florida—concentrated mostly in the populous South Florida counties of Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach—generally has been declining in the past few weeks and the seven-day average of new deaths has plateaued.

As of Friday, there were 1,384 residents of long-term care facilities in the state with Covid-19, or 0.9% of the total resident population. There were 388 deaths of long-term care residents.

People aged 65 and over make up 20.5% of Florida’s population, the second-highest proportion of any state in the U.S., after Maine.

“Everyone in the media was saying Florida was going to be like New York or Italy and that has not happened,” Mr. DeSantis, a Republican, said during an appearance with President Trump at the White House last week. The governor has consulted regularly with the Trump administration on the state’s coronavirus response.

“In the early, exponential-growth phase of an epidemic, starting an intervention a week earlier is absolutely huge,” he said.

It is too early to know how the state’s actions will play out long-term or if they might work in other places, given Florida’s unique population and geography.

The state needs to double its current volume of testing to more than 32,000 tests a day to detect and respond to flare-ups, said Charles Lockwood, dean of the University of South Florida Morsani College of Medicine at a news conference with Mr. DeSantis last week. That will take about a month, according to the governor.

As of Saturday, Florida had more than 35,000 cases of Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, and 1,364 deaths, according to state data. In late March, a model developed by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington was predicting nearly 7,000 deaths in the state by August—a figure modelers said could shift depending on adherence to social distancing.