The OP was posted June 8. Here's how Florida has fared over the summer, compared to other highly populated states.
[Aw, nuts, the graph won't display. Deaths per 100K from Jun 20 to Sep 21 from John Hopkins, 10 most populous states:
Florida
70
Texas 37
Georgia 35
NC 24
California Illinois Michigan Ohio 12
PA 11
NY 8]
How Florida fell so far behind California in battling the coronavirus
States like
Florida have shown “a real desire not to adopt any of these other strategies, and in fact, highly politicizing these other strategies,” Bibbins-Domingo said.
Trying out new control strategies as the Delta variant hit was essential, she said.
“The Delta variant threw [California] a big curveball, and all of a sudden, it meant that the margins for error — the margins that were — we didn’t have them anymore,” Bibbins-Domingo said. “And so even though we had high vaccination rates, they were not going to be high enough. And we were going to have to do something else in order to keep the rates low.”
Higher vaccination rates and mask use indoors “have helped to blunt this fourth surge in California as compared to Florida,” said Dr. Robert Kim-Farley, medical epidemiologist and infectious diseases expert at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. “We are seeing better application of public health measures in California compared to Florida.”
Some epidemiologists and infectious diseases experts say Florida was hurt by leaders there making statements contradicting leading scientists and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which
advised by late July that masks again be worn in indoor public settings.
Florida was blessed with some advantages earlier in the pandemic. California’s rate of
overcrowding in homes is more than double Florida’s, a huge vulnerability during the winter surge at a time vaccines weren’t widely available. Living in dense multigenerational households made it easy for the virus to spread from workers to family members, continuing a long chain of viral transmission.
Meanwhile, many elderly people in Florida decided on their own to stay home and declined guests, keeping a very vulnerable population safe. “Because of the elderly population, nobody would come — who is going to visit their parents in winter of last year and bring COVID-19 to his family or her family?” Mokdad said.
In California, Delta’s arrival led many
local health officials to reinstate mask requirements, but in Florida, the “laissez faire attitude that worked” relatively speaking last winter evaporated, Mokdad said. When officials failed to change their strategy, “the Delta variant was able to infect the population.”
Eventually, California and Florida will achieve similar levels of immunity, Mokdad said, but California is on track to achieve it “through vaccination and less suffering and less deaths.”
