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Comment by debacle | Hacker News Reader

Is there a notable difference in case loads between Socal and Norcal?

Florida seems to have done relatively well for themselves (unless you buy into conspiracy theories about misreporting case loads), but I wonder if vit D and general level of outsideness plays a big role, but it's hard to make apples to apples comparisons between Florida and e.g. New York.

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I'm a bit baffled by the assertion Florida's doing well.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...

NY: 300/100k

FL: 289/100k

NY's deaths are also more heavily weighted towards the initial outbreak, when the mortality rate was much higher due to lack of treatment knowledge/options. https://imgur.com/a/fdb1tl7

Also there's plenty of reason to believe that Florida's numbers are serious underestimates. IIRC their testing rate has been low, and they've been in the news for suppressing bad numbers more than once. I might trust numbers from an independent study, but not from anything under the DeSantis regime.

Florida also has a significantly older population than NY, so those figures should be age-adjusted to take into account COVIDs disparate mortality across age groups. [1] Amongst large states Florida (239) is much closer to California (216) than NY (299) after adjustments, and California had some of the most severe lockdowns, while Florida had some of the most lax.

Still, if they merely kept even with NY, and also managed to have a booming economy, a net influx of population, and very little disruption in primary school education, I’d say that’s pretty good.

The damage that has been done to a generation of disadvantaged kids in states that shut down schools for extended periods is going to have to be reckoned with for years.

[1] https://www.bioinformaticscro.com/blog/states-ranked-by-age-...

Hi, former Florida-man here. Is this accounting for the considerably larger portion of old people in FL vs NY? 42.1% vs 45.6% 45+, 15.4% vs 19.3% 65+ for NY and FL respectively.

Sources:

http://edr.state.fl.us/content/population-demographics/data/... https://www.health.ny.gov/statistics/vital_statistics/2016/t...

Methodology: Took the Florida 2010 and estimated 2020 numbers and averaged them together to get a "2015" estimate, then compared it to the 2016 NY data.

If we're handicapping stats, it seems only fair to account for the fact that most of NY's deaths were in the March 2020 spike long before the vaccine or therapeutics like remdesivir hit.

Relatively well for themselves over what time frame? If you're referring to the last few weeks or the current state of affairs, I'm not sure there's anything to say Florida is either worse or better off than New York, as opposed to their curve just bring time shifted.

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