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As to PA, I don't know what you're real estate agent told you but I can assure you there were no restrictions on looking at houses, excepting during the initial phase when everything was shut down, but certainly not by 2021. There may have been people who didn't want to risk showing houses to people from out of state and made up laws to avoid an argument, but PA never jumped on the train where they restricted anyone from out of state. In May 2020 they put out guidelines for the real estate industry in accordance with their reopening plan, but it didn't say anything about out of state travel. It also only applied to counties in the red and yellow reopening phases, and every county was in the green phase by the end of June, and they ditched the color system after that.
I also mentioned it in my initial post but it doesn't hurt to repeat it here: Philly doesn't count. This is often more of a joke at their expense but during the pandemic they were literally on a separate system that meant statewide guidelines didn't apply to them. I don't know the exact distinction or reasoning behind this, but enough things are different about Philly that I don't bother asking questions.
As for the school thing, the school system here is different than in the South (and a lot of other places). School districts here are independent government authorities that don't always follow municipal boundaries. School boards aren't subject to the same level of centralization as they are in places like Florida. School districts here were free to set up their own COVID guidelines, and most of them were back in-person at the beginning of the school year. Some delayed a few weeks, but were otherwise in-person. The exception was the City of Pittsburgh itself, which was ostensibly in-person but seemed to regularly be reverting to online after the latest scare, but the governor had nothing to do with that, and DeSantis couldn't have done anything about it if he wanted to because the PA governor doesn't have the power to tell local governments what to do. The exception to that was the 2021 mask mandate you were referring to, but there's more to the story than that. It was initially supposed to be the district's prerogative to make the decision, but as the summer wore on, school boards and superintendents were dealing with angry parents on both sides of the issue. Wolfe couldn't tell the schools that they couldn't implement a mask mandate, but he could require them under the emergency health powers. So he required it, but the purpose of it was to deflect the criticism towards himself so the schools could get on with their business.
I got a similar impression, but I think it was less due to the laws that were in place than it was the general attitude of the people. Yeah, the further south you drove the fewer masks you saw and the more people were in bars and restaurants. But there were never any real restrictions anyone took seriously. There were some stupid rules involving bars but nothing that would really stop you from drinking there (and some of the harshest lockdown critics in my social circle actually long for those days because they inadvertently made things more social). Aside from people occasionally talking about the virus, things were pretty normal for most people by the time vaccines were widely available in the spring of 2021. I'm not saying some places weren't more restrictive, I'm just saying that having traveled to PA, OH, WV, VA, MD, and NC at the time I didn't notice too much of a difference.
It wouldn't have mattered. Trump handpicked these people as experts for his task force early in the pandemic, and it had become apparent that he found what they said politically inconvenient. They never had any real power, just a microphone and the credibility of being the nationally known authorities. By the time Atlas came on the scene it was already clear to everyone that he was hired because he said what the president wanted to hear. If he fires Fauci it doesn't stop Fauci from going on TV every 5 minutes saying the things he would have said anyway, and from still being treated as an expert by anyone who was still doing so at that point. The media would have treated Atlas as a hack and probably had Fauci on after every press conference to tell you how much of what he said you should actually believe. It's one thing to disagree with the policy implications of the information your experts provide. It's quite another to say you want to rely on expertise but then replace your guys with yes-men when they don't tell you what you want to hear. Trump already had a problem with this in his cabinet, but at least it was behind-closed-doors stuff that came out later in tell-all books. This would have been public, and in the midst of an election season no less. He made the right decision in keeping Fauci, however grudgingly, and distancing himself from Atlas.
Aside from those points, though, thanks for clarifying. If I have anything to add, I think that Desantis's gambit was less a stroke of personal genius than more of a risk/reward decision that worked out in his favor. If you really believe he did a significantly better job than other governors, one has to ask why other governors didn't follow in his footsteps? I doubt he had access to information the others didn't. He was able to tap into a growing anti-restriction sentiment by becoming the face of it, and by actually using his power to not only remove restrictions, but keep localities from enforcing them. But I think he overplayed his hand and got away with it. Most governors quietly let restrictions expire and kept up the messaging about personal responsibility because they knew that in the event of a catastrophe they wanted those powers in their back pocket. Even if they thought such a catastrophe was unlikely, they weren't willing to bet the farm on it. Desantis made that gamble, and while it may have paid off, I don't know what it shows about the man other than that he's willing to take unnecessary risks if he thinks it will earn him political points. What would have happened if COVID started spreading through Florida's retirement communities and nursing homes like wildfire after September 2020, to the point where the statistics were unequivocal? Would he have had the courage to go back on his policy? Would he claim the numbers were wrong (Even if they were pretty conclusive)? Would he say that the deaths were an acceptable cost for removing the restrictions? Luckily he was never in this position.
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