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Comment by terminatornet | Hacker News Reader

https://stanforddaily.com/2023/05/25/stanford-professor-jay-...

> During the live broadcast, Bhattacharya said it was “an absolute honor” to work with Desantis and praised what he described as DeSantis’ abilities to make decisions on COVID-19-related issues despite criticism. He expressed support for DeSantis’ rolling back certain pandemic-induced restrictions, including school closures, saying, “Governor, you did the right thing when you opened the schools.”

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/health-care/article27487670...

> From March 2020, when the pandemic began, through March 22, 2023, Florida recorded 7,542,869 COVID-19 cases and 87,141 deaths, the 12th highest rate in cases and deaths per 100,000 people among the 50 states and Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico.

I'll be honest, if Jay Battacharya thinks Florida did a great job handling covid, i'm not sure i trust his judgement!

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They weren’t a particular outlier, which is notable considering how old their population is. And compatible with New York which through the kitchen sink at Covid.

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

I dunno, 404 where the worst was 455 doesn't seem great either. I'd be curious what the "age-adjusted death rates" look like (whatever the unit of such a metric might be?)

I don't have the age-adjusted death rates, but FL is 5th in the nation in terms of median age (42.2). This is over a decade older than the youngest state (UT: 31.1). [1]

1: https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/median-age-...

Oh that's surprising, I expected the median age to be much higher for FL. It sounds like FL's population, while older than most, isn't really that old in absolute terms?

You have to add a whole lot of old people to move the median much. I suspect the mean would tell another story.

What really matters is not median age, but how many people are over 65.

Why did this get downvoted? If you're just looking at death rate, it's absolutely true. Over 3/4 of all COVID deaths in the US were aged 65+. [1]

Lots of other people got COVID, and some of them became seriously ill or died (mostly over 50). But the supermajority of Americans who died were over 65.

1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...

There are many covid believers on HN. It is hard to argue with someone who makes decision based on faith not facts.

heres some facts for you: life expectancy dropped worldwide starting in 2020. to what do you attribute that if not covid?

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy

It is the most probably because of covid, what else could it be?

If your argument is proven with statistics you're on weak ground.

- my statistics professor

What did she mean? That if the impact of a treatment is so difficult to discern that you're looking at some statistic to judge it the treatment probably is not effective.

The fact that Sweden doesn't stand out as a horror show relative to everyone else is indicative, as well as places with strict enforcement of lockdown rules. Nobody stands out

I agree. Even though I disagree with the restrictions and coercion and don’t think any of it really worked, even I would expect to see a significant difference between say a Sweden or Florida in a California. Instead, we are arguing about minutiae.

Sweden does stand out compared to their Nordic neighbors. They had ~1200 more deaths per million than Norway & Finland in the first year of pandemic. We're so inured to COVID death once we hit a million that some multiple of 9/11 doesn't stand out, eh?

https://tinyurl.com/sweden-vs-nordic-covid

https://tinyurl.com/sweden-vs-nordic-cumulative

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7797349/

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-022-01097-5

See here's one of my problems with the pro-hard response side: they often seem to be a solution seeking a problem.

If you only look at the first year of the `sweden-vs-nordic-covid` link it looks pretty bad for Sweden, but if you extend it out, Finland and Norway traded early reduced mortality for later increased mortality.

This suggests Covid is highly transmissible, and restrictive policies just shift mortality out a little bit, not reduce it. Sure it's great to save lives, but at what cost to society? You need to balance mental health, the needs of children for social and educational development, and the economy.

You can't stop the world because people who are old or very sick are dying, that's nature, we're all subject to the same rules. You always need to balance the societal harm potential against the benefit, and with Covid our leaders seem to have forgotten that in many places.

Translation: I was wrong but I'll pretend I'm right.

Extend the timeline out as much as you want. Sweden still has a lot more cumulative dead per capita. And you are simply lying that Norway had increased fatalities and so just shifted it in time. The gap between Sweden and Norway slightly increased by May 2023.

Spare me your opinions and standard talking points after seeing data contradicting Sweden was some shining star of stellar policies due to GBD principles. A lot of our "leaders" like DeSantis forgot that pretending your expert in things you know nothing about and finding the most partisan hack doc you can for Surgeon General doesn't mean you're making correct decisions.

We could also talk about morbidity but that would make your weak argument even worse. After all, quality of life is SO important during the limited lockdown times but let's not measure significant decreased qualify of life for millions of Americans from Long COVID. And lets all hope there isn't significant subclinical issues like increased thromboembolic activity (frequently seen post-COVID) that will rear its head later.

Timing matters. Take a look at this, which is cumulative deaths per capita from the start of the pandemic in the US to now for New York, Florida, California, and Washington [1].

New York got hit early and hard, having a large number of deaths in the first 2-3 months before anyone knew how to deal with COVID. After that New York did better than average.

Florida got through the first 2-3 months fine, with about the same low number of deaths that California and Washington had. Handled well they could have stayed like that, but instead they started having a higher than average death rate and closing the gap with New York in total deaths.

Florida's highest death rates were during the delta wave, which was after vaccines were widely available. The vaccine was very effective at preventing death from delta, which is why California and Washington had slight upturns in the death rate at that time as opposed to the steep rise in Florida.

[1] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states-...

My understanding is that Florida did about average if you adjust by age (lots of elderly people there). Couple that with keeping the economy much more open and schools shutting down a lot less (if at all?), it makes it a lot better than average. That's the argument.

With that in mind, I can't find a link to back up the claim about age-adjusted death rate ranking. I thought I saw one before. I found this one that goes by year:

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/covid19_mortality_...

Looks like they did badly in 2021 and well in 2020. Ideally I'd want to look across all years, since that's the "when it's all said and done" question.

Most people seem to criticize the Great Barrington authors because of whom they chose to associate with, rather than their actual position on medicine and science.

Even as somebody who frequently shakes his head at Florida, they really didn't do significantly worse in a way you could pin on the governer's policies. The entire covid cycle was a learning process and people frequently made useless comparisons, such as rank-ordering states that have very different demographics.

Let's all be intellectually honest here and push back on some of the common post-COVID tropes.

> I'll be honest, if Jay Battacharya thinks Florida did a great job handling covid, i'm not sure i trust his judgement!

According to the science and data, Florida did no better or worse than basically anywhere else. I dunno what else to say. Y'all got lied to.

Dr. Vinay Prasad, a self-professed Bernie supporter, recently did a video [1] on DeSantis' COVID policy. His conclusion was that DeSantis was among one of the top governors in the country, and "near the top" of all the political leaders in the world.

The video discusses vaccination policy, mask mandates, school reopenings, and death rates. The TLDR is that policies that different governments enacted did not seem to have much impact on death rates, and that therefore what was given up (in terms of closed schools/businesses/etc.) was somewhat in vain. I think he should have spent a little time on non-death impacts, such as long COVID, which seem to be more prevalent in people who got COVID pre-vaccine.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYNV8AP0EJU

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