Florida

[FreeinChrist]

If so, it would be refreshing if anybody on that side of the issue other than yourself would say what you did.

What we hear instead are horror stories about how so many people are dying terrible deaths from the virus--all because of an uncaring President, you know.

I don't know what you are listening to, but I read medical sites and more. The huge problem, frequently stated on this site and said in this thread, is that the virus leaves many with kidney failure, lung failure, liver failure and heart failure.
The death rate has slowed probably do to having more supplies now, doctors learning more about it (like starting anticoagulants in the hospitalized patients), and things like plasma treatment, Remdisivir and other things.
And there is a huge problem with too many getting seriously ill at one time and overwhelming hospital service.

But some seem to prefer to believe the theory that less deaths at this time means the virus wasn't so bad all along.

 

[hedrick]

I wondered whether NJ was being alarmist to ask people from FL to self-isolate. Our cases are up for the last few days. In Hoboken, the mayor said they had 13 new cases, of which 12 had just come from regions that are hard hit. The governor says they're having reasonable success getting people come from FL, etc, to get tested and isolate themselves. This is an example. It's likely that the 12 people got tested specifically because of their travel. If everyone does, then we might be OK. But our Rt has just gone slightly over 1. Of course that counts these 12 people. If the relevant people are isolating, then the Rt may be misleading.

 

[lasthero]

If so, it would be refreshing if anybody on that side of the issue other than yourself would say what you did.

It’s been brought up quite often.

Just because you’re not aware of people talking about it doesn’t mean no one is talking about it.

 

[Allandavid]

If so, it would be refreshing if anybody on that side of the issue other than yourself would say what you did.

What we hear instead are horror stories about how so many people are dying terrible deaths from the virus--all because of an uncaring President, you know.

Given that many locations no longer report Covid deaths (meat plants, deaths at home, nursing homes), the death count may still be higher than the ‘official’ figures indicate. It’s akin to Trump’s warped logic about “if you slow the testing, there will be fewer cases”...

 

[dogs4thewin]

However the federal government (and the president) led the way. Instead, we have a president who is engaging in fantastical thinking (it will just disappear), making it a political issue so that red state governors are emboldened to ignore science. The failure of the president and FEMA to set a single source PPE supply for states is an example. States were paying much higher prices for everything

It is a disgrace.


This is an interesting article on it:
Can the government legally force you to wear a mask? - Poynter


Yes, the states enforce, but with a lack of federal leadership on the pandemic, states are left to act like individual countries and ignore what is best.

But hey, Florida hit 11,000 new infections today. Lots of elderly Trump supporters there are at risk.

lots of elderly people everywhere are at risk whether they support Trump or not, but as far as I can tell it is not the elderly doing things like throwing co-vid parties and they cannot control whether other people do or not.

 

[ThatRobGuy]

The issue is that (like everything else unfortunately), this thing is being politicized.

Florida was doing okay until about 1-2 weeks after the protests (which is the typical incubation time from transmission to symptom onset).

(protests started occurring 5/25-5/26)

Yet, this is being used to bash their governor just because he's a popular target due to his alignment with Trump.

The numbers were stable (even with the re-opening) for a month. Protests happen, a week later, cases spike, media conclusion = "look, it's that foolish pro-Trump governor re-opening too soon".

...which ignores the fact that dozens of other states, some with strict policies still in place, started experiencing the same thing and around the exact same time.

From my own personal perspective, some states did start the re-opening too soon. June 1st would've been a much better target for that as it would've prevented some of the larger easter gatherings, reduced most of the "spring breaker" traffic, and prevented a lot of the memorial day gatherings.

However, if you look at a situation where there were massive close-contact protests occurring, and a week later, cases start spiking, and your conclusion is "Gee, the main culprit must have been from people hanging out at the beach six weeks ago" or "This must be because a family went to eat in a socially distanced restaurant being served by someone with a mask & gloves 4 weeks ago", then I'd suggest that maybe you're looking at it through a partisan filter.

Even if you want to go with the "it's a combination of different things" (which is the theory I personally subscribe to), the largest culprit has to be the protests...despite the media narratives that are trying to claim it's all about the early re-openings by republican governors.

 

[lasthero]

The numbers were stable (even with the re-opening) for a month. Protests happen, a week later, cases spike, media conclusion = "look, it's that foolish pro-Trump governor re-opening too soon".

If the protests are behind it, why aren’t the states with the highest number of protests seeing the biggest increase? New York, Maryland, and other states saw a high concentration of protests, far more than Texas and Florida. Why are certain states seeing this big spike, while others seem relatively stable?

 

[rjs330]

Of course not. The best estimate currently seems to be about 0.5%, but that is a percent of an invisible set of infected people. When assessing severity, it’s better to use visible things like sickness, people in hospitals, ICU use, etc. Saying that there are more people invisibly sick than we thought so the death rate is lower doesn’t change anything real.

It is true that at the moment fewer people are dying than in the past. That’s good news if it continues. But dying is only part of the picture. Hospital capacity is still a problem.

Incidentally, deaths are going up in AZ and FL, just not as fast as infections. That’s good, and is probably due to younger average age, not errors in the mortality rate. There will likely be some following infection due to contact between them and older people, but if we’re lucky it won’t be as bad as in the first peak.

if hospital rates were lower maybe we could have different policies for younger people. But with the real situation, that doesn’t seem so attractive.

Well .5% is a far cry from 10%

 

[dogs4thewin]

If the protests are behind it, why aren’t the states with the highest number of protests seeing the biggest increase? New York, Maryland, and other states saw a high concentration of protests, far more than Texas and Florida. Why are certain states seeing this big spike, while others seem relatively stable?

Could be how those protests were done for example your organized protests where people may or may not have had masks on is different from unorganized protests or riots where almost no one had a mask on and people were just everywhere. I am not saying that that is the only factor but that could be something to see.

 

[rjs330]

However the federal government (and the president) led the way. Instead, we have a president who is engaging in fantastical thinking (it will just disappear), making it a political issue so that red state governors are emboldened to ignore science. The failure of the president and FEMA to set a single source PPE supply for states is an example. States were paying much higher prices for everything

It is a disgrace.


This is an interesting article on it:
Can the government legally force you to wear a mask? - Poynter


Yes, the states enforce, but with a lack of federal leadership on the pandemic, states are left to act like individual countries and ignore what is best.

But hey, Florida hit 11,000 new infections today. Lots of elderly Trump supporters there are at risk.

I see it's all the presidents fault that states decide to do masks or not. Washington didn't require it. He just stayed home. It was the mayor that decided. Good grief you'd think the president has to do everything. He has to require everything he has to provide everything.

That's not how this country was built. The states can make their own decisions. What the governor's are completely incapable of looking at their own states and making decisions? That's why we vote for them. We don't vote for the president to be a dictator.

Quit blaming the president for everything. Good grief.

 

[FreeinChrist]

lots of elderly people everywhere are at risk whether they support Trump or not, but as far as I can tell it is not the elderly doing things like throwing co-vid parties and they cannot control whether other people do or not.

Yes, obviously.

However, Trump needs Florida and there has been a lot of elderly Trump supporters in the state. It would seem to me that a Republican governor would think of that.

 

[FreeinChrist]

I see it's all the presidents fault that states decide to do masks or not. Washington didn't require it. He just stayed home. It was the mayor that decided. Good grief you'd think the president has to do everything. He has to require everything he has to provide everything.

That's not how this country was built. The states can make their own decisions. What the governor's are completely incapable of looking at their own states and making decisions? That's why we vote for them. We don't vote for the president to be a dictator.

Quit blaming the president for everything. Good grief.

Considering how Washington handled smallpox in the troops, his opinion was known.

No I think it is a bad example by the President, and the governor, and Republicans in the state seem to follow suit. Have a few relatives retired there who think the whole pandemic is fake. They are also very vulnerable.

 

[FreeinChrist]

The issue is that (like everything else unfortunately), this thing is being politicized.

Florida was doing okay until about 1-2 weeks after the protests (which is the typical incubation time from transmission to symptom onset).

(protests started occurring 5/25-5/26)

Yet, this is being used to bash their governor just because he's a popular target due to his alignment with Trump.

The numbers were stable (even with the re-opening) for a month. Protests happen, a week later, cases spike, media conclusion = "look, it's that foolish pro-Trump governor re-opening too soon".

...which ignores the fact that dozens of other states, some with strict policies still in place, started experiencing the same thing and around the exact same time.

From my own personal perspective, some states did start the re-opening too soon. June 1st would've been a much better target for that as it would've prevented some of the larger easter gatherings, reduced most of the "spring breaker" traffic, and prevented a lot of the memorial day gatherings.

However, if you look at a situation where there were massive close-contact protests occurring, and a week later, cases start spiking, and your conclusion is "Gee, the main culprit must have been from people hanging out at the beach six weeks ago" or "This must be because a family went to eat in a socially distanced restaurant being served by someone with a mask & gloves 4 weeks ago", then I'd suggest that maybe you're looking at it through a partisan filter.

Even if you want to go with the "it's a combination of different things" (which is the theory I personally subscribe to), the largest culprit has to be the protests...despite the media narratives that are trying to claim it's all about the early re-openings by republican governors.

Memorial Day parties and gatherings didn't help at all. The rise followed reopening.
There weren't big protests in Arizona yet their numbers are also way up and is tied to reopening, and a governor who did not require masks and only allowed the cities to require them after the numbers started rising.
Personally, I think it was reopening too soon more than protests, and people resistant to wearing masks or taking the pandemic seriously.

 

[ThatRobGuy]

If the protests are behind it, why aren’t the states with the highest number of protests seeing the biggest increase? New York, Maryland, and other states saw a high concentration of protests, far more than Texas and Florida. Why are certain states seeing this big spike, while others seem relatively stable?

A couple of different factors.

1) Spread rates are largely going to be defined by how many people have immunity or partial immunity to the virus already. So localities that originally got hit harder in the beginning are likely to have more people with immunity. Some of the preliminary estimates are showing that 20% of people in NYC have already had it. NYC also started enforcing strict curfews to keep people off the streets before protests got too large and out of hand.

2) Specifically selecting NY and Maryland are omitting states that were still under strict policies that saw an uptick around the same time, like California.

3) You'd have to quantify "large concentrations of protests". In Florida (since that's where Chauvin's summer home was) there were several large scale protests. Large-scale, multi-day protests took place in Miama, Jacksonville, West-palm beach, Ft. Lauderdale, and Tampa. Large scale protests took place in TX as well, specifically in Austin, Dallas, and Houston...Houston in particular since that's where Floyd's hometown is. The large protest in Houston lasted multiple days, and had an estimated 60,000 participants. Compare that to Vermont, which is doing alright, and their protests only involved an estimated 1,200 people. California is another case where protests happened in 170 cities
List of George Floyd protests in the United States - Wikipedia

4) In states like my own (Ohio), the uptick occurred around the same time, and and was almost exclusively in the counties of Cuyahoga, Franklin, and Hamilton (Home of Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati). I live in an adjacent county to one of those, where we've been re-opened for over a month, and have only had 4 new cases in the past 2 weeks...and 3 of those were tied/traced to people who had traveled to one of those other aforementioned counties to take part in a protest, the 4th was a person who came in contact with one of them.

 

[ThatRobGuy]

Memorial Day parties and gatherings didn't help at all. The rise followed reopening.
There weren't big protests in Arizona yet their numbers are also way up and is tied to reopening, and a governor who did not require masks and only allowed the cities to require them after the numbers started rising.
Personally, I think it was reopening too soon more than protests, and people resistant to wearing masks or taking the pandemic seriously.

List of George Floyd protests in the United States - Wikipedia

Arizona, Texas, Florida, and California have all had large protests. (for Arizona, it's specifically Phoenix)...their recent Covid map lines up with that.

Meanwhile, Flagstaff, which only had a protest consisting of 100 people (and very short lived), didn't seen nearly that kind of spike.


The nobility of a cause doesn't make large social gatherings any less transmissible events. I get that protesting police injustice is far more noble than "I want my state economy numbers to look better for reelection" or some other pandering purposes...but I don't think the virus cares about that.

If a group of friends meeting at the beach, outdoors, to hang out for a few hours is "a potentially dangerous game" (that's what governors said, that's why they closed down beaches), then there's no rationale to think that people gathering in the street in close vicinity would be any different.

 

[FreeinChrist]

There are a whole lot more people and businesses in the Phoenix area than spread out in the rest of the state.

And Florida has more than beaches. There are plenty of bars and restaurants.

I agree the protests didn't help in any city, but I think most states reopened before they had containment of the virus. And some states failed to really close down.

 

[ArmenianJohn]

The issue is that (like everything else unfortunately), this thing is being politicized.

Florida was doing okay until about 1-2 weeks after the protests (which is the typical incubation time from transmission to symptom onset).

(protests started occurring 5/25-5/26)

Yet, this is being used to bash their governor just because he's a popular target due to his alignment with Trump.

The numbers were stable (even with the re-opening) for a month. Protests happen, a week later, cases spike, media conclusion = "look, it's that foolish pro-Trump governor re-opening too soon".

...which ignores the fact that dozens of other states, some with strict policies still in place, started experiencing the same thing and around the exact same time.

From my own personal perspective, some states did start the re-opening too soon. June 1st would've been a much better target for that as it would've prevented some of the larger easter gatherings, reduced most of the "spring breaker" traffic, and prevented a lot of the memorial day gatherings.

However, if you look at a situation where there were massive close-contact protests occurring, and a week later, cases start spiking, and your conclusion is "Gee, the main culprit must have been from people hanging out at the beach six weeks ago" or "This must be because a family went to eat in a socially distanced restaurant being served by someone with a mask & gloves 4 weeks ago", then I'd suggest that maybe you're looking at it through a partisan filter.

Even if you want to go with the "it's a combination of different things" (which is the theory I personally subscribe to), the largest culprit has to be the protests...despite the media narratives that are trying to claim it's all about the early re-openings by republican governors.

But in NY where we had more protesters and more active protests our numbers are going down. What's the difference between NY and Florida that Florida's numbers are spiking???

Oh yeah, the governors. Cuomo is not racing to re-open everything whereas Florida's governor did. Cuomo takes the threat of the virus seriously because he follows the science and the data but Florida's governor laughed it off and took the political approach of opening everything up because Trump wanted the economy 100% open. Cuomo didn't open up much of anything and has backed off opening certain things while Florida opened all their bars, restaurants, beaches, stores, etc. to near-full or full capacity.

Yet here you are trying to blame it on protests. Funny how those protests only affect the Republican-led states adversely. Just keep ignoring the facts and blaming the protests. That way we can pretend the "economy over human lives" approach isn't a problem but rather Black Lives Matter is now to blame for the coronavirus.

Pretty ridiculous conclusion to blame it on the protests when that was something all the states experienced while ignoring the real difference between the states' experiences, that being that some opened everything up way too early while others cautiously kept things closed/limited and safe.

 

[lasthero]

1) Spread rates are largely going to be defined by how many people have immunity or partial immunity to the virus already. So localities that originally got hit harder in the beginning are likely to have more people with immunity. Some of the preliminary estimates are showing that 20% of people in NYC have already had it. NYC also started enforcing strict curfews to keep people off the streets before protests got too large and out of hand.

What about New York State as a whole? What about Washington, DC? Chicago? Seattle?

2) Specifically selecting NY and Maryland are omitting states that were still under strict policies that saw an uptick around the same time, like California.

I didn't 'omit' states, I said 'and other states'. Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Virginia, Pennsylvania and many other states have had mass protests that rival or exceed anything in Florida, Texas, or California, and they're not seeing these massive spikes. In some cases, they're even going down, or at least holding steady.

In states like my own (Ohio), the uptick occurred around the same time, and and was almost exclusively in the counties of Cuyahoga, Franklin, and Hamilton (Home of Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati).

Wouldn't you expect the counties with the highest populations to have the highest amount of cases? Isn't that what you'd expect, regardless? Those three counties account for nearly a third of the entire population of Ohio.

I'm not going to say the protests have had no effect or that they didn't cause some degree of uptick, but I think it's reach to lay sole blame on them. It's likely a multitude of factors.

 

[FireDragon76]

I don't know what you are listening to, but I read medical sites and more. The huge problem, frequently stated on this site and said in this thread, is that the virus leaves many with kidney failure, lung failure, liver failure and heart failure.
The death rate has slowed probably do to having more supplies now, doctors learning more about it (like starting anticoagulants in the hospitalized patients), and things like plasma treatment, Remdisivir and other things.
And there is a huge problem with too many getting seriously ill at one time and overwhelming hospital service.

But some seem to prefer to believe the theory that less deaths at this time means the virus wasn't so bad all along.

The death rate is slowing mostly due to demographic changes in who gets sick. When it was ravaging nursing homes, it was killing alot of people quickly. But there's always the danger now that hotzones of infection will put seniors and older people at high risk again.

There are a whole lot more people and businesses in the Phoenix area than spread out in the rest of the state.

And Florida has more than beaches. There are plenty of bars and restaurants.

I agree the protests didn't help in any city, but I think most states reopened before they had containment of the virus. And some states failed to really close down.

I live in Florida and watched it happen. The state simply did not follow the CDC guidelines. They basically said they would, but did nothing to enforce anything.

 

[FireDragon76]

I wondered whether NJ was being alarmist to ask people from FL to self-isolate.

No, it's not alarmist . I live in Florida and it's really become quite out of control, with even many rural counties becoming hotzones. I've also watched in the past few weeks as more and more people engaged in highly socially irresponsible behavior, all the while the state was not adhering to CDC guidelines as a whole. So it only makes sense that New Jersey wants to protect itself from people bringing the disease from Florida.