It looks like Florida is two shades "better" than California in the diagram, which would put the total Florida death rate as better than California. That would be interesting because Florida did almost no lockdown.
How could that be?
How could that be?
Maybe travel in and out of Florida is fluid enough to explain it to some degree.
uh, what? I don't understand why anyone would willingly try to catch a disease...
(get your kids the chickenpox vaccine, don't do those chickenpox parties if those still exist. The vaccine drastically reduces the occurrence shingles later in life. I'm a bit envious that my younger sisters got it, but I got chickenpox as a child. Seeing it flare up in my dad every 18 months doesn't give me hope).
I'm a little surprised that the quoted age of most Americans having it is not less than that. The chickenpox vaccine was only authorized for use in the US in 1995 (I was born a bit before that, my siblings after that). That would make everyone 28 or older at least 2 years old before the vaccine came out in the US, which is the most likely age people got it.
(Assuming that immigrants in the window of 1988 to 1995 from nations who authorized in that period do not make up a substantial fraction of the present US population).
2. There were some "get covid" parties at University of Alabama (probably others): https://abc3340.com/news/local/university-of-alabama-respond...
3. There are shingles vaccines: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/shingles/public/zostavax/in....
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/alabama-covid-19-party-students...
They actually thought risk was lower than it was, went to Florida and unfortunately caught the bug.
Edit made, since all this happened in the window.
For deaths it seems by far the most important is not lockdown, but rather protecting elderly. So maybe Florida prioritized that, and didn't spend effort on lockdown, while California prioritized lockdown thinking it would also help elderly.
(I mean, that definitely happened, but I haven’t seen analysis quantifying the significance of the total contribution.)
There’s a whole lot of omitted confounding variables in the “compare aggregate totals and jump to policy conclusions” games people are playing.
Maybe I can find graphs.
Here's a cumulative death per capita graph for 5 states that illustrate 5 different patterns [2]. Most states followed one of these patterns.
There is the "New York" pattern: densely populated states with a large elderly population. Hit very hard very early with a very high death rate, but after a couple of months got a handle on it and from then on was about average.
There is the "Washington" pattern: a fairly steady rise in deaths per capita, never quite under control but never really out of hand either.
The "Florida": like Washington for the first 3 or 4 months, then shifts to a more rapid growth, and pretty much stays there.
The "California": 3 or 4 months like Washington, the starts to Florida but gets the rate back down, then spends another 3 or 4 months like Washington (but shifted up because of the burp at 3 or 4 months), but then loses it in the third wave almost catching up to Florida.
The "South Dakota": low population low density state that with reasonable precautions should do better than Washington, but by working really hard to ignore it manage to end up with high numbers.
Use the drop down to flip that graph from total deaths to total cases, and South Dakota is even more striking.
Flip to new cases or new deaths 1 week averages to compare how they all are doing currently. Florida's currently running about 3-4 times the new cases as California, and about 50% more new deaths. (Change the highlight dropdown from "All Highlight & All Current" to "All Current" to make it easier to see the latest values).
It will be interesting to see how vaccination will affect this. With the more easily transmittable variants becoming more common, which also seem to hit younger people more, I've seen the estimates from what we need for herd immunity go up to 80-90% from the early 70% estimates for the original variant.
Overall, there are enough people who say that they will not get vaccinated to make it unlikely that the US can reach that, especially if it turns out to be 90% needed. However, those people are not uniformly distributed among the states. I would not be surprised if in a half a year we end up with two kinds of states: those where it is fully under control due to herd immunity and life has largely returned to normal, and those where it is still sickening and killing a lot of people.
[1] https://www.usmortality.com/
[2] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states-...
Most of California's deaths occurred in a wave from January to March of 2021, while Florida had their first wave in the summer of 2020. (https://linqbymarsh.com/blueicustominsights/covid-insights is good for historical data like this).
There’s a whole lot of omitted confounding variables in the “compare aggregate totals and jump to policy conclusions” games people are playing.
Very true, but the lack of clear correlation between level of restrictions and Covid outcomes is at least some evidence against lockdowns.
Figure 7, the cumulative total death rate, is probably more relevant to the point you’re trying to make, in which case FL and CA are in the same bin.
One conclusion you might draw is that the effectiveness of lockdowns cannot be inferred from this single map.
Maybe your problem is more with the media than any side which they defined.
Wearing masks on beaches and in restaurants etc may slightly impact the case count but really doesn't impact mortality in the same way that an outbreak in a care home does.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat...
We should be concluding that lockdown and masks leads to more deaths, not less (or at the very least that they are an unjustifiably expensive public health intervention), and begin rolling back all restrictions immediately.
It would make more sense to compare similar countries, and Sweden is drastically worse than any its neighbours. Not only that, they changed course and added tougher restrictions than originally, so they themselves realised it doesn't work to fo nothing.
Why do people still ignore that?
[1]: https://mobile.twitter.com/TedPetrou/status/1390340398699192....
If you argue about healthcare reforms overall then sweden does much better than Finland and Denmark, as expected lifespan was still much longer even when covid was at its worst. So a Sweden with covid every single year is still better off than Finland and Denmark without covid. Likely they could do better if they implemented some of Swedens others healthcare reforms rather than fight covid.
It's worth noting that the governments in both Japan and Sweden have very strongly recommended distancing, and probably just as importantly they've provided some funding to allow individuals and businesses to comply. Just paying people to stay home without a compulsory element might have been quite effective in many societies with relatively high civic virtue and social trust, but only Japan and Sweden seem to have actually tried it.
Besides, if we're just cherry-picking examples -- well, Canada is doing much better than Sweden. Or America. And Canada is more comparable to America than Sweden. And Canada has had more drastic shutdowns and restrictions compared to America. So how does that fit into the picture?
Figure 5: The (estimated) ratio of reported versus total deaths. It appears from it that FL was more accurate in their reported numbers than CA. That has absolutely nothing to do with lockdowns.
Figure 7: The cumulative deaths, where FL and CA are the same color (that is, in the same range of cumulative deaths).
Either way, neither indicates that FL's death rate was better than CA's.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...
Shows that FL has a higher death rate than CA. Though if you take the adjustment from this paper into consideration, then CA's would be worse.
In Florida, where a vast amount of people go to vacation, out of town covid cases were not counted.
What I don't get that people who don't want lockdowns also oppose masking and other measures. Why not try to keep things open but also strongly support masking just to be sure?
There's limited evidence they work more than a short-term delay tactic and cause tremendous harm.
Not all of those countries are islands (The UK is one, and you may note that it's not on the list.)
But all of those countries instituted short, hard lockdowns, and relaxed them after bringing local cases to zero.
Around here, we institute half-assed lockdowns, that are lifted when enough people complain about them (only to come back, as cases surge). Maybe that's why they don't work for us - because we are politically and socially incapable of dealing with even a few weeks of hardship.
New Zeland, and Australia had few cases when they did lock down, and are islands.
Korea has a very disciplined population compared to the West.
Really you should be comparing the US to Europe. The EU didnt do much better, but was far more draconian. Or within the states.
But anyway, i never know if people are serious when they propose the China or Australian model. Those were brutal and Im glad to be voting for a constitutional amendment next week to limit the governor's lockdown authority.
I never know if people are serious when they suggest that a few hundred thousand dead is a worthwhile footgun-sacrifice to escape the draconian rule to which Australians and New Zealanders were subjected to over the past year. I'm generally a bit leery of ideological arguments that necessitate sacrificing those numbers of people for some intangible, abstract good.
But if we are going to go down that road, can I get a say in which people we will get to sacrifice to meet that ideological objective?
The common denominator in all covid success cases seems to be an effective and strong contract tracing and quarantine protocol. That is the tried and true method used to defeat outbreaks.
If you have a good contract tracing program, a short-hard lockdown can be used to delay the outbreak while your tracers find and isolate the infected.
But without an effective contract tracing program (and I'm not talking about some bullshit smartphone app, but public health contract tracers with the power to actually do something), the lockdown is just a delay tactic.
Even if we got down to 0 cases in April 2020 in the USA, the virus would work its way back in within weeks, if not days. Without a tracing program that works, we'd be back to ten thousand cases in a few months.
All those countries have tight border controls. We get hundreds of thousands of illegal border crosses ever year. We'd have to deploy the military along the Mexican border and probably Canada too.
I don't think a single state has really tried to ramp up contract tracing efforts to the required levels.
And Australia had a several month long lockdown to get defeat a relatively small, isolated breakout. The bigger the outbreak the longer the lockdown is needed. And the longer the lockdown, the less severe it can realistically be. I accepted "don't have any social visits" for 6 weeks, but I wouldn't comply if they asked for 6 months. You can close factories for a couple weeks, but not for 6 months.
They had regional lockdowns early in the pandemic. The US... Had a patchwork of half-assed regional lockdowns, that came weeks late.
> All those countries have tight border controls. We get hundreds of thousands of illegal border crosses ever year. We'd have to deploy the military along the Mexican border and probably Canada too.
The overwhelming majority of border cases in the US did not come from illegal crossings in Mexico. They came from legal crossings through controlled borders, because the US did not implement any quarantine control on inbound travelers. It asked for travelers to self-quarantine as a courtesy, with no verification or enforcement, with predictable results.
It's true that lockdowns without contact tracing just delay the problem. The US has failed at that too. If you caught COVID in April, chances are, you'd have no idea who you caught it from. It would have been difficult to engineer a more spectacular disaster, if we tried.
You need two parts to this equation. Lockdown, and contact tracing. Both are required, and it's disingenuous to say that lockdowns don't work. It's fair to say that they don't work as we implemented them. Our implementation of them is not the only implementation of them.
But in my hypothetical where we got to where NZ and AZ are right now (no covid in the community), and quarantine controlled entries, uncontrolled border crossings would 1000% bring in new cases. My point is you need to seal your borders nearly 100% to pull off what NZ and Az do.
And some of it’s a law of large numbers issue. If there is a 1/10,000 chance covid makes it through border quarantine, then if we have 50X as many crossings, we’ll need 50X as many mini-lockdowns. At some point it becomes impractical.
I don’t think it’s fair to say “lockdowns work” when you really mean “lockdowns work at the very start of an outbreak when paired with a strong contract tracing, quarantine, and border sealing.”
I think there is a point of no return at which you cannot lockdown/trace your way back to zero because the virus is everywhere is large numbers.
Total speculation, but I think the US would have had to implement the NZ plan + military on the borders + internal restrictions on travel to different metro areas in Feb. 2020 to have really successfully avoided Covid.
Well, I was initially responding to a context-free claim about them not working. I agree, my response was also a bit light on context, and it made a stronger claim than was warranted.
> Total speculation, but I think the US would have had to implement the NZ plan + military on the borders + internal restrictions on travel to different metro areas in Feb. 2020 to have really successfully avoided Covid.
That may be true. It might not be. I think we will never know, because official policy at the time was 'don't test sick people [1], sweep everything under the rug to make the numbers look good, don't let private providers test people, institute a delayed travel ban that does not include Europe.'
[1] Unless they recently traveled from a foreign outbreak area. I remember reading about the hoops people had to jump through to get tested - and how many of them just gave up on the whole thing. Official policy was not to test non-travelers, because there was no evidence of community spread. Of course, if you never test anyone, you won't find any...
With China, we don't have enough information to make the claim that they under-reported deaths. If you CTRL-F China in the OP data on them is absent. I'm a bit surprised that the author could extrapolate a gap between reporting and actual deaths for every other country except that one.
As for comparing EU and the UK to Australia and New Zealand, that's more easily explained by the much higher air traffic volume between these countries and covid hotspots early on. In short, the combination of being "islands" with limited ports of entry and smaller passenger volume meant that early border closures could be much more feasible and effective.
Korea for all intents and purposes is an "island" in this comparison as well, in that on 3 sides it's surrounded by water and its northern border has no ports of entry.
A short, early response with entry closures and contact tracing does seem to be key, but I don't agree with the notion that we need to emulate their lockdowns. I'd rather wear a mask forever than be like them. The UK got the worst of both worlds since they got stricter lockdowns than the US without getting it under control. The decision to go for zero and stop all social life in order to get down to zero deaths from all covid is commendable but not our obligation. Our duty was to stop from overwhelming our medical system only, not to go for zero by giving up all social life and the economy.
All the cherry picking data in the world will not help you if you get sick.
I am really sorry that some abstract principal becomes a hill to die on.
I cant speak for the OP, but for those of us who have given life and death some thought, lockdowns are worse than death.
"Lockdowns are a unacceptable imposition on freedom" I can understand. I disagree, but I understand.
"lockdowns are worse than death" strikes me as odd.