Mike Pence: Travel ban on Brazil, ‘other countries’ on the table

Vice President Mike Pence said Wednesday the U.S. might restrict travel from Brazil and other countries as the administration eyes emerging hot spots of coronavirus transmission.

“We’re watching very carefully what’s taking place in South America including Brazil. We saw in recent days a significant spike in cases,” Mr. Pence said during a trip to Florida to discuss its COVID-19 response. “And the president’s made it clear that we’re considering additional travel restrictions not just including Brazil, but including other countries.”

The U.S. previously banned foreign nationals from entering the U.S. if they’d been in China during the previous 14 days.

President Trump argues the ban, which took effect at the beginning of February, saved thousands of lives. He later expanded the ban to Iran and then most of Europe in mid-March.

Brazil has recorded 275,000 cases of COVID-19, the third-most in the world.

The crisis put the Sao Paulo health system on the brink of collapse and shone a harsh spotlight on President Jair Bolsonaro, who has downplayed the pandemic.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently said he would like to rapidly test Brazilian travelers before they get on a plane for the Miami region, which sees a lot of travel from Latin America.

However, the White House has flirted with a ban.

Also Wednesday, Mr. DeSantis angrily defended his response to the coronavirus pandemic, lashing out at media outlets that raised questions about his early approach and the dismissal of an employee who worked on the state’s COVID-19 case portal.

Mr. DeSantis, a Republican and key Trump ally, is sore over predictions his state would see massive problems due to spring breakers who descended on Florida beach towns in March.

After withering criticism, the governor issued a state shutdown order at the start of April.

So far, Florida has seen 47,000 cases and 2,000 deaths — relatively good numbers given the size of the state and early predictions.

“You got a lot of people in your profession, who wax poetically for weeks and weeks about how Florida was gonna be just like New York, wait two weeks Florida’s gonna be next. Just like Italy wait two weeks,” Mr. DeSantis told reporters.

“Well hell, we’re eight weeks away from that, and it hasn’t happened,” he said.

Mr. DeSantis said Florida has a lower death rate than other places despite seeing an influx of people from hot spots, including New York.

“We have a lower death rate than the Acela corridor, D.C., everyone up there,” he said. “We have a lower rate death rate in the Midwest, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, but even in our region, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida has the lower death rate.”

The governor also defended the firing of an employee who ran Florida’s COVID-19 case portal.

Rebekah Jones says she was dismissed because she refused to pull raw data from the portal, according to The South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper.

“She’s somebody that’s got a degree in journalism communication and geography. She is not involved in collating any data, she does not have the expertise to do that,” Mr. DeSantis said. “She is not an epidemiologist, she is not the chief architect of our web portal, that is another false statement, and what she was doing was she was putting data on the portal, which the scientists didn’t believe was valid data.”