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Comment by optimiz3 | Hacker News Reader

COVID does worse in warmer climates; it would be useful to see data adjusted for factors such as ventilation, climate, baseline prevalence, viral variants, etc.

No one AFAIK has attempted to do any of this work. All I've seen are unsubstantiated claims for each side's agenda.

We need to know what hard conditions guarantee an R0 small enough to prevent disease transmission in schools.

There has been zero leadership here.

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Catholic schools opened in all states that allowed them to, and there hasn’t been - to my knowledge - any outbreak of Catholic COVID.

The Archbishop of New Orleans is working hard on this. Don’t count him out yet.

> COVID does worse in warmer climates

Is that really substantiated or has it just been theorized? California and Texas have been doing poorly compared to Florida so heat itself doesn’t seem to be the differing factor if it is a factor at all.

Technically, it's based around the fact the virus spreads slower in summer (warm, humid) than winter (cold, dry). Though I suppose California and Texas are more (warm, dry) so maybe the union factor is dry. Or something else like population density or time spent indoors.

California and Texas have been doing poorly compared to Florida

That is simply not true. California has had fewer cases per capita, fewer deaths per capital, and more tests per capita.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

> > COVID does worse in warmer climates

> California and Texas have been doing poorly compared to Florida so heat itself doesn’t seem to be the differing factor if it is a factor at all.

California is much colder than Florida, if you weight it by population and not land area.

Wouldn't be surprised if that is also true of Texas. Both have large tracts of sparsely populated arid, very hot land that contributes to popular image but isn't where most people live.

Also, California has not been doing poorly compared to Florida, but there are a whole lot of non-climatic differences.

As a resident of New Orleans I would like to speak for my city and tell you to go jump in the nearest body of water

California COVID death rate: 0.146%

Florida COVID death rate: 0.155%

These numbers are statistically tied.

Yet, FL's economy is open, kids are in school, Disney World entertaining tourists.

CA's business are closed & kids are depressed and falling behind.

(Bad) leadership matters.

Interesting claims. How do you know FL economy and kids depression is doing so much better than CA?

Unemployment rates for one. But now, numbers are skewed because we printed billions of dollars to bail out California.

we printed billions of dollars to bail out California.

Do you have a (non-opinion piece) citation for this from a reputable source?

California’s robust budget will get another $26 billion from new COVID-19 stimulus

- https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-03-11/californ...

You wrote "to bail out California" and yet the headline says "robust budget." Do you have evidence that California was bailed out?

How much money does California give the federal government compared to that $26 billion that it got back? How much does California give vs. other states?

Florida is currently facing a $2-$3 billion tax shortfall (numbers vary depending on the time of projection [0]) and California is facing a budget surplus [1]. There are details around this like one-off capital gains and tax rates and budget cuts, but the overall story is that FL had a slightly higher death rate than CA in exchange for an overall economy that isn't doing so well. Some of this is due to the fact that FL's economy is tourism-driven and my personal response to that is: as a tourist I was very tempted to (safely) visit FL this winter, but the whole "our state doesn't believe in basic COVID restrictions" thing made that much too scary.

[0] https://www.wftv.com/news/local/facing-3-billion-shortfall-l...

[1] https://apnews.com/article/gavin-newsom-california-coronavir...

Will you adjust your priors after seeing death rates between California and Florida are roughly the same?

They're not the same, Florida is higher. But overall Florida seems to be an outlier among the "low restriction" states and California seems to be an outlier among the "high restriction" states. A better approach would be to average the groups of states that took different approaches, and maybe also try to normalize by other confounders like population density. This is probably a better approach because there might be other pandemics in the future that are way deadlier, and we should actually know what works and what doesn't.

Note that this is Florida's official death rate which we know underestimates the real rate. The governor stepped in and made all numbers go through a special department which does things like throw out any deaths from non-residents (snowbirds and visitors).

Based on excess death counts, the real number for Florida maybe 25-100% higher. See:

https://www.statnews.com/2021/01/25/undercounting-covid-19-d...

https://www.sun-sentinel.com/coronavirus/fl-ne-florida-coron...

https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2020.3061...

Those are theorizing based on excess deaths. Meanwhile, when the records were directly inspected, they found that Florida's death count was inflated by about 10%: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/house-report-say...

The rates seem to be indeed quite similar, but what are your sources for these numbers? A simple Google search [0, 1] yields

California: 57.501 deaths, 3.641.664 cases (= 1.58%)

[0] https://g.co/kgs/kooiXn

Florida: 32.712 deaths, 2.004.354 cases (= 1.63%)

[1] https://g.co/kgs/Mrh3NR

Total number of cases to total state population is just shy of 10% in both cases.

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