Florida, Center of Covid Mandate Resistance, Has Lowest Infection Levels in U.S. | Hacker News Reader

Florida, Center of Covid Mandate Resistance, Has Lowest Infection Levels in U.S.

newsweek.com

32 pointsmrfusion9 comments

Sounds like how we expect things to work - if you let covid run wild, you get through the wave faster, while other regions are still making their way through their wider, flatter waves.

But Florida, and other states like Alabama and Mississippi paid a heavy price for their now-low infection rates. They've really shot up the per-capita deaths charts. I guess it just depends how many lives you're willing to trade.

Can anyone point to a good source that has data on per-capita deaths grouped by age range per state? Florida has an older population so I wouldn't be surprised if they had more deaths per-capita.

OK, I ran some numbers. CA vs FL since they have very different opinions on how to handle this. This doesn't consider other variables like comorbidities, differences in classification, or reporting. This also doesn't consider any snowbird effect.

https://imgur.com/a/cplE5jn Top: Pop per age group per state, Middle: Covid only deaths per age group per state, Bottom: What does the difference in age group death rate look like when applied to the entire US population?

This is not per-capita, but contains age bracket breakdowns per state. It shouldn't be too hard to find demographics for each state and compute per-capita numbers if you want.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm

My suspicion is that Florida will move down the full-pandemic list a bit after adjusting for age, but will remain near the top when considering the most recent wave.

Yes, Florida is very bad at detecting non-severe cases, so it has a low case rate. The Right has been pushing Florida’s recent case rate for about a month, after spending the rest of the pandemic pointing to death rates as the right thing to compare, because case rates are affected by differences in surveillance, among other reasons.

Florida’s recent COVID death rate is still above the national level, at 0.50/day/100K vs. 0.38 nationally.

Given how the single largest predictor of covid death is age, a state with the 6th largest median age in the country is bound to stack high on the raw covid death rate metric.

That being said, the OP is too early to proclaim victory. Covid flows in waves. Florida had an unusual late summer wave, which has fortunately receded. Alas, the winter season is long, plenty of room for another one. Time will tell.

As Governor Gavin Newsom says, it’s all about seasonality:

“We know why: because [of] the seasonality to COVID,” Newsom said. “It’s not particularly difficult, after a couple of years, to understand. You see those trends in Europe. You see those trends extend in other parts of the globe. Unfortunately, that’s what’s happening here.”

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-11-09/winter-i...

That’s definitely a fair argument to make. I’d be curious what you’d think about the media’s response to the exact same claim when Desantis made it:

https://old.reddit.com/r/LockdownSkepticism/comments/qr34sz/...

(A reddit comment with a collection of links to articles)

The propaganda is so obvious it hurts. This headline is about an anecdotal statistic that changes on a weekly basis. Not long ago, Florida had the highest infection rate in the US.

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