Coronavirus in the United States - news and thoughts

Florida's death rate is 33% higher than California's. At scale, that's a large difference. Click thru for full tweet thread.

 

While the majority who get COVID recover without hospitalizations, the numbers speak for themselves. Those who are vaccinated have a significantly greater chance of recovery without hospitalization than those unvaccinated. Here are the numbers from Quebec.

Multiplying the rate of unvaccinated people per million by 14.7 to account for approximately 14.7 million people living in Ontario shows that the province would currently be seeing about 11,085 COVID-19 patients in hospital if everyone were unvaccinated, said Juni. If the entire population of Ontario was fully vaccinated, that number would drop down to about 1,832 hospital patients.

Also accounting for age, data from Quebec demonstrates that those who are unvaccinated have 5.9 times the risk of COVID-19-related hospitalization and 10 times the risk of ICU admission compared to those who are vaccinated against the virus with two doses.
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The weekly numbers published from the state of Washington tell a similar story, and have been telling it for months.

12-34 year olds: 5 times more likely to be hospitalized if unvaccinated
35-64 year olds: 7 times more likely to be hospitalized if unvaccinated
65 and older: 8 times more likely to be hospitalized if unvaccinated

There's plenty of other data out there just like this. The vaccine may not do as well to protect infection from Omicron. But it's your best bet if you want to stay out of the hospital or worse, the morgue.

And keeping people of the hospital or worse, the morgue, is the job of people like Dr. Fauci. This is their number one concern. In hindsight, they may not always make the right decisions, but then when you are dealing with a novel, meaning new virus, you can't expect anyone to have all the answers before they have all the facts.

If you take your next drive and don't put on your seatbelt, you are highly unlikely to get into a car accident and die. But we have laws about seatbelts because wearing one significantly lowers your odds of doing exactly that, dying in a car accident. And while seatbelt laws met with some early resistance, they are now accepted part of our culture. Yet, when all the data points to a vaccine against a deadly virus says it is effective at keeping people out of the hospital, the resistance continues. And those pushing for the life saving vaccines become the enemy? It's mind boggling.

 

Whatever more freedom you think FL has, it is a perversion of logic to think that not doing anything to prevent the spread of disease (or worse, preventing agencies & biz from taking safety measures) because freedom, despite that the spread is based on that freedom because humans are the vehicle. Akin to your hospital saying we won't make you wear ppe or take any safety measures...because freedom.

FWIW, California has over 10 million more and Texas over 5 million more Blacks, Hispanics, and elderly than Florida.

*Edited TX to 5m. Originally wrote 8m.

 

lol what??

Florida has the second most citizens 65+

California is ranked 45th.

Texas is ranked 48th.

guess which age group makes up 80% of all Covid deaths…

Which U.S. States Have the Oldest Populations?

 

Looks like your link shows Calif. with millions more than Fl. in the 65+ age group. The rankings are by % of pop. I believe.

 

FL has a higher percentage of 65+, but CA has about 1.43 million more elderly. Remember, CA has about 18m more people than FL.

Combining elderly w/Blacks & Hispanics, of the big 4, CA has over 10 million more and TX over 5 million more, NY about 3m fewer.
(I made an error above writing that Texas had over 8m more).

For age-adjusted covid death rates, CA & 17 other states have done better than FL; but of the big 4, TX & NY worse.

 

California just barley has more seniors. We dwarf California in how many Seniors live per square mile.
California also has a healthier senior group than pretty much every state in the US.

California also has one of the youngest populations in the US.

It’s easy to see why they have a lower death rate. Couple that with they avoided a winter delta wave and instead we all got lucky with Omicron.

 

We age-adjust data to account for differences in age-distributions. Makes for a better comparison than simply using rates per 100k.

I am not sure about your seniors per sq mi. or FL seniors being in worse health, but I certainly would like to see data. I don't think we can assume that FL's numbers are worse based on undefined and unmeasured differences in health. I also have to ask wrt seniors per sqmi, is this adjusted to where seniors actually live or based on total land size? Makes a difference for obvious reasons.

 

Generally, as a percentage of population compared to most states in the country, Florida has a much higher population percentage of those three groups.

Making people wear masks outside is not a reasonable safety measure. Continuing to mask kids in school is not a reasonable or logical safety measure. Arbitrarily allowing some businesses different rules than others are not reasonable safety measures. Keeping kids out of school as long as many did is not a reasonable safety measure. Saying you can take your mask off to eat and talk at your table but have to have it on walking to the bathroom is not a logical safety measure.

In the beginning of the pandemic most safety measures made sense. As more information was gathered and we understood the virus more and we developed tools to fight against it and protect ourselves many of those same measures started to not make sense yet they were still aggressively enforced in many states.

I seldom wear a gown when caring for most of my Covid patients anymore even though I am technically required to. Why? Because we were informed that we didn't have to change gowns in between patients if they were all Covid and had no other diseases that would require a gown change. And it came out last year that Covid infection from fomites seldom if ever happens. So wearing a gown is really just theater. Uncomfortable and tiresome theater. Much like many of the rules that were followed way to long by many states.

 

So you are claiming hindsight can be clearer than foresight. Well yes.

 

I'm claiming that even after we developed insight many states were still blindly ignoring it in favor of the old "foresight".

 

The fact that FL didn’t compare as horribly to some other states as expected I’d chalk up to dumb luck. In comparing to states like NY FL didn’t have to deal with the initial wave severity because of NY density, it hit there sooner and it was colder in NY when the first wave hit. FL was hit heavier during the summer, which is likely not quite as conducive to spread as cold winters. Also, the fact that Covid dragged on 2 years somewhat offset the initial effectiveness of preventative measures. So CA prevents much of the first wave, only to be hit harder the following winter. Unless you are in perpetual lockdown it catches up with you. Especially with progressively more transmissible variants.

I think Desantis was right with schools, which he did follow the science. However his issuing mandates against some preventative measures was way over the top.

As to “freedom” in those countries that stayed on top of it, mainly in the Far East, preventative measures allowed more freedoms. To some extent the freedoms some argue for here are not much different that the freedom to pollute. Freedom to spread infected air. Freedom to fill up hospitals.

Having said all that, I’m happy I was in TX through this whole ordeal vs some of the more restrictive states.

 

I'm having a hard time following this. One the one hand you're basically arguing in favor of overly restrictive measures as being worth it yet were happy you weren't living in one of those "safer" states. And I'm not sure where you're going with the whole polluting thing as it relates to anything I said.

I'm glad I spent almost all of my Covid time in Florida as opposed to places like Virginia where I visited during pandemic. The difference was like night and day. The fear people had up there was palpable and over the top. I can just imagine what it was like in California and other states run by liberal governors. And when people came down from those states for the weddings of my daughter and then my nephew it was funny to see the horror on their faces at first when they saw how people were actually going about living their lives normally......only to end up being the ones who cut loose the most.

I disagreed with DeSantis on mandating that private companies couldn't institute their own mask or vaccine rules. That to me is government overreach. But other than that, I think DeSantis did as good or better of a job as any of the other governors when taking into account all factors.

 

It should be noted that the age adjusted death rate in Virginia was 31 deaths per 100,000 lower than Florida. If Florida's age adjusted death rate was that low, it would have saved just short of 7,000 lives.

 

I’m not arguing for against either approach in this post, just pointing out its more complicated than most make it out to be.

As to the pollution argument, again I’m just pointing out the fallacy of framing it as a freedom argument. It’s not totally unlike smoking. In most cases people no longer have the freedom to smoke in buildings. But people have the freedom to breath clean air. One person’s freedom can lead to another person’s lack of freedom.

To some degree it was luck of the draw. Republicans reacted one way, Democrats reacted another. Much of the reactions were based upon politics and not science. But nonetheless the future was unknown. What seemed like it may make sense turns out may not have with 2 years of hindsight.

 

What were the age adjusted death rates in NY, NJ, Conn, RI, Penn? How many extra people did those governors kill? What's that you say? It's a dumb attempt at gotcha'? I agree.

 

Lower than Alabama, Texas, Tennessee, and Oklahoma. But I wasn't cherry picking states based on their rates and working back to the theory. I chose the state that you mentioned. If you want, I could do the same calculation for California, which you also mentioned.

 

I also just mentioned NY, NJ, Conn, Penn and RI. Do those in relation to Florida.

 

Nah, my point was made. You answered by cherry picking based upon the results that you wanted to see.

 

LOL. Talk about bad backstroking. You tried to make a stupid point that DeSantis was "responsible" for more age related deaths than Virginia then called it "cherry picking" when your "argument" backfired on you. LOL