Sunshine Sentinel

A born and raised New Yorker has detailed in a recent opinion piece why she decided to move to Florida, part of a new trend nationally in a post-COVID-19 world. 

Karol Markowicz said in an opinion piece that ran in the Chicago Tribune that she and her husband planned on raising their children in Brooklyn and then retire in Manhattan. 

The couple stayed in New York through 2020 and the pandemic before seeing a sharp "turn for the worse," and moving to Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. 

Markowicz and her husband are not alone. 

Every day through 2025, it is projected that 845 people are moving and will move to Florida, as detailed in a Bay News 9 article. 

Markowicz has been very open about how much moving to Florida has improved her family’s quality of life and has appeared on "Tucker Carlson Tonight," "Your World with Neil Cavuto" and other radio shows as noted in the Chicago Tribune piece. 

School closures in New York was one of the main reasons for the move, Markowicz said in her piece, saying that they were closed "arbitrarily" in New York throughout fall 2020 and spring 2021 when policymakers "ignored" any new information about the virus and refused "to move forward," which she said deprived students of valuable class time. 

She said in her piece that on the two or three days of "remote learning" each week, the children would get art, music and physical education over Zoom. She added "this was not school."

In Florida, schools were mostly open for in-person instruction throughout the pandemic, with the exception of spring 2020, as stated in a WUSF article. Gov. Ron DeSantis called the closure of schools during the pandemic "probably the biggest public health blunder in modern American history." 

DeSantis also said, as stated in the WUSF article, that the effects of virtual learning caused students to fall behind and that school closures did not mitigate the spread of the disease.

Markowcz said in the Tribune piece that "all the news from Florida was that it was like a 2019 wonderland. People were sane. Masks were not worn in low-risk situations. Kids went to school every day."