A better description of Florida would be "perfectly average". In deaths per capita they are right in the middle of US states. Obviously Florida could have done better, but many other states have done far worse.
The ones above Florida are either the dense area of the NY extended metro that got hit early and had trouble getting it back under control, or states ideologically aligned with Florida.
Just because they're in the middle doesn't make it a good response.
It also doesn't necessarily make it a bad response. But when you factor in more than simply one detail (COVID vs COVID+economy+mental health), it starts to look like a good response.
There's less difference than their public policies might suggest. Reportedly lots of senior citizens in Florida voluntarily social-distanced themselves from everybody. The press reported on square dancing and packed beaches, but the anecdotes I heard were that vulnerable individuals were taking things very seriously (despite the lack of restrictions) and self-quarantining away from everyone else.
Meanwhile, in SoCal, basically nobody followed the mask mandates and social distancing restrictions. The rules were more like guidelines, and guidelines that were ignored. They also have a lot more problems with overcrowding, with immigrant populations that need to work, etc. So in terms of what people were actually doing, SoCal was actually engaging in significantly riskier behavior than Florida.
If you compare Bay Area, where people largely did follow the mask & social distancing guidelines, with Florida or SoCal, the death rates are not the same. SF and San Mateo counties had approximately 1/3 as many deaths/1M as the U.S. (and Florida) average; Santa Clara had about 1/2 as many.
The vulnerable voluntarily self-isolating, while the less vulnerable live more normal lives, is a very desireable outcome, and much better than a blanket lockdown, which imposes restrictions on large subsections of the population which are not vulnerable.
Depends on your threat model. If you're worried about old people dying from COVID directly, then yes, it makes sense. If you're worried about the hospitals being overwhelmed and then people dying from car crashes and heart attacks, then targeted self-isolation of vulnerable people isn't going to help as much.
As a healthy 30-something, my chance of dying from COVID is about 1:3000, about 300x better than an 80-year-old. However, my chance of being hospitalized from COVID is about 3%, which is only about 7x better than the 80-year-old. The hospitals were overwhelmed, here (Bay Area) and in many other cities. Even now (2 months after the Christmas/January surge) Santa Clara County still has 21% of its ICU beds taken up by COVID patients.
U.S. life expectancy dropped by a full year during COVID. We were concerned about the 0.1 year declines in 2016-2018 from the opioid epidemic (which did affect young people), and this was 10x that. It'll be interesting to see how all-cause mortality has varied among different states in 2020-2021.
One thing I'd add is that the loss of education and economic wealth from the lockdown is going to impact life expectancy for years to come, so that also needs to be taken into account.
> Meanwhile, in SoCal, basically nobody followed the mask mandates and social distancing restrictions.
Huh? I’m from SoCal and almost everyone wears masks here all the time, all shops require masks on entrances, so I’m not sure where this narrative comes from?
I've had multiple friends in LA say (around November-January) that people were basically ignoring the mask mandate and having a bunch of parties anyway. Perhaps it's different now; this is before the huge outbreak and lockdown.
Indeed, San Francisco has dramatically better Covid outcomes than almost all large US cities.
The thing SF screwed up worst was opening indoor restaurants/bars for a couple months in the Autumn, which alongside holiday gatherings/winter weather resulted in a more than 10x increase in cases during that time (thankfully starting from a very low baseline). I would guess that mistake is responsible for more than half of all Covid deaths in the city, as both before and after that period (after suitably offsetting the data by a couple weeks to account for delay between action and visible outcomes) case rates were steadily declining.
SF also did a poor job, especially early on, at getting targeted testing and outreach to working class neighborhoods.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
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