The New York Times has a long piece today about the "steep cost" of Ron DeSantis's loose COVID policies, and it's a little hard to follow. But there's a simple way to judge the results of anyone's COVID policy: excess mortality. Here it is for Florida:
Florida's excess mortality during the big Delta surge of late 2021 was way higher than the national average. Since then Florida has been right at the national average.
Those are the facts. Interpretation is up to you. We can certainly say that Florida isn't a success story, but aside from the Delta catastrophe it's not a failure either. I'd call it mostly average.
"Today’s competitive markets, whether we seek to recognise it or not, are driven by an international version of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” that is unredeemably opaque. With notably rare exceptions (2008, for example), the global “invisible hand” has created relatively stable exchange rates, interest rates, prices, and wage rates." --Alan Greenspan
The question is whether one happens to believe in Adam Smith's version of the invisible hand or Milton Friedman's version. The difference is the same as the difference between up and down.
Adam Smith's thinking was informed by a principle he expressed in The Theory of Moral Sentiment (1759), which is "do unto others as you would have others do unto you" except in different words.
Milton Friedman's thinking was informed by a principle he expressed in Capitalism and Freedom (1961), which is "do unto others before they do unto you" except in different words.
As per my comment on another one of Kevin's recent posts, the question is whether capitalists love competition, which is good, or love to kill the competition, which seems like the orthodox interpretation.
Question: What happens when one word means two things that are opposites? Answer: The word becomes nothing more than vocalizations used to establish one's position in a dominance hierarchy. In that case, we can do away with language and revert to an ancestral species set of pre-language vocalizations (joke ... ish).
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The chart is useless. Florida's peak during the Delta wave is much higher than the chart shows. If we don't get accurate information, then any conclusion is also useless.
There is a chart in the article and gives accurate information. Not sure why Kevin didn't use it.
It is fascinating. I truly don't understand why Kevin did this.
The trick to remember here is: there's no respawn.
Overall, FL is #10 in deaths per capita and @9 in cases per capita. Not really that great.
The end of the chart does not suggest that Florida came out average; it shows that, over time, from deaths and seroprevalence (from infections and vaccinations), fewer additional people died from COVID. It follows that, were Florida to have a higher rate of vaccination, there would have been fewer COVID deaths.
So, I'm not sure what the point of your chart is, because the bottom line is, the more vaccinations, the fewer deaths. If you wish to dispute that, then say so.
Excess deaths by political affiliation, in Florida + Ohio. Look at the charts (figure 2) on page 5.
Do Republican voters notice? They do not, because they hardly know any Democrats, or anyone else. They're increasingly cloistered and alienated and no one is really helping them, because they want to be cloistered, they want to be at a far distance, they want to be protected.
You can't argue with someone about who they are, the only step forward from that is extermination, but you can argue about who their oppressors are.
Wondeful piece of misinformation.
"The article makes some points that I will ignore. Instead lets look at a chart that hides the worst of the results and is designed to make it impossible to see the overall sitiation. Ignoring the obvious failures, there isnt a failure according to chart that makes it hard to see if there was a failure...although its up to every individual to decide!"
Really bad chart. Really bad takr.
Misleading or purposefully misleading? Signs indicate the latter.....
What do you mean by "rate" here? If time is in the denominator, then what you really want is the integral of that graph; the fact that Florida (and everyone else) is trending to zero is not meaningful. If time is not in the denominator, then the graph is wrong, as the total per capita deaths in Florida are about 17% above the national average.
Florida's cumulative excess death rate since the pandemic began is worse than the United States as a whole, but better than almost every other state in the southern band from Arizona to Georgia. They were just about tied with Louisiana, and only a little worse than California.
Political alignment just doesn't seem to have made a major difference. Region did.
I was too kind about the likelihood of political leadership affecting excess mortality. Let me try to fix that.
Further digging tells me that Florida's relative mediocrity in protecting its people from covid was achieved only by relatively good results in the first year of the pandemic (through February 2021), during which time Florida's elevated mortality stood at 20.7% above normal, against 24.5% for the whole United States and 26.4% for the South region. Since then, Florida was suffered about the same mortality as the rest of the South, which is worse than the country as a whole.
In year 2, Florida's excess was 28.0% above normal, while the country was not as bad at 22.1%.
In year 3, Florida was 13.4% above normal, and the U.S. was at 11.2% above.
In year 4 (post-pandemic year 1?), from March through May, the latest month for which the death statistics seem to be complete, Florida is still performing worse than the nation, at 5.8% over normal mortality, while the country totals are at 3.7%.
This is based on data from https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Death-Counts-by-Week-Ending-D/r8kw-7aab
Florida also made a point of NOT counting citizens of other states who happened to die in Florida. With a large snow bird population that skews older, this obviously is going to affect results.
Also, this should all be normalized by age class. Since our elderly were the primary group dying from COVID, total numbers are less meaningful than mortality per age class.
Excess mortality is effectively normalized for age.
Good point. Most of the tme measures require at least a little massaging to extract a meaningful signal. But in some happy cases, they don't.
FWIW, the CDC offers both a crude and age-adjusted rate. KD used the crude rate.
My interpretation of this Covid debate is simple. Republicans are assholes. No good deed ever goes unpunished. In a crisis, no one will protect you. They will exploit it for political gain. So really… why bother?
The entire Democratic Party platform is about trying to make life easier, better, safer for people. And yet… that really not what a good number of people want from government. So really… why bother?
I guess those sex workers you (pretended to be) worried about the other day are just shit out of luck then, since you're back on the "why bother doing anything to improve anybody's life?" kick again today...
Yep - that’s the fundamental truth of our time. We are all SOL. 😂
That does leave us with a few opportunities. Take care of those you love. Stop wasting resources on those you can’t help. They mostly aren’t interested anyway. And Mr. Drum will endlessly remind you how stupid it is. I learned my cynicism right here.
If the polices on your wish list lack any sort of reasonable level of support and engender outright hostility… what else can you do?
Democrats wanted to lock down as long as possible and keep children out of school as long as possible. How is this making life easy? Add the mask mandates for children as young as two despite knowing that masks did nothing to stop the spread of coronavirus.
This is a lie.
Average in a country that had the highest number of deaths in the world (of the countries accurately reporting) is not good. Much of our country didn’t take masking and social distancing seriously.
Compared with Japan and some others who were serious about prevention our outcomes are a public health disgrace.
Thesis one of those times you are better off using raw numbers than a chart. Depending upon whose numbers you use, Florida had the 10th or 12th highest death rate. They did start out doing better but it was clearly due to policy and state messaging that they fell well behind the national average. If you look at the death rates in all states while there is sort of a regional component it's also clear that it correlates with political ideology.
California at 256 deaths per 100,000 puts it at about 37th, much better than the national average. Florida was at 404. Arizona worst at 455. Just to put the tin perspective, Croatia is the country with the 8th worst death rate at 398. If Florida
were a country they would then displace Croatia and be 8th worst in the world.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covid19-death-rates-us-by-state/
Other than that massive die-off with Delta, mostly average. Kinda like, other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln? Florida should have done better. And I'm not convinced that their data was collected in a fully comparable way to other states.
This. If a state manages to achieve average deaths every year from all causes, but then has a single month in which its death rate is (literally) off the charts compared to all other states for a cause that was entirely preventable... yeah I still think that's a problem, even if the state reverts back to normal. In highly developed countries, death rates should never be so dependent on different governance competencies.
I was going to say something like that, too. I searched the comments for Lincoln. Those are my thoughts exactly.
To the extent that Florida is now average, isn’t that likely because other states have essentially stopped mitigation efforts?
California stopped mask mandates and most/all of the mitigation efforts some time ago. What would be more interesting is a look at Florida’s vaccination rate now.
"aside from the Delta catastrophe" is the problem though. it's like saying the Raiders are a good football team, they played a tied game with the Chiefs for three of the four quarters, aside from the third when the Chiefs scored 42 points on them.
There was a vaccine during Delta. There was no reason for a catastrophe. We knew by that point that covid was lethal, we had s vaccine. Any catastrophe was avoidable.
Meanwhile, among the Brevard county GOP, other doings “average” … https://cbs12.com/news/local/brevard-county-gop-covid-19-vaccine-bioweapon-gov-ron-desantis-florida-attorney-general-ashley-moody-treasure-coast-july-13-2023
The issue is not the proximate effect, but the ultimate effect of a divide and conquer strategy versus a united we stand strategy. For both, there is a three step process.
United we stand process Step 1: unite, Step 2: stand, Step 3: return to Step 1 and repeat until everyone is united.
Divide and conquer process Step 1: divide, Step 2: conquer, Step 3: return to Step 1 and repeat until the only thing left to divide is me, myself, and I (hello MTG!).
That bitch (MTG) deserves to be in jail for violating DC's revenge porn law. I doubt she had consent to show Hunter's dick pics and nude pics of the anonymous women with him to others within DC's boundaries.
Also, off topic from my semi-off-topic comment: I don't know that screaming "Biden men are well hung" at every opportunity is the turn-off for low-info voters that the Republicans seem to think it is. Their own voters seem to love explicit displays of masculinity and dominance, and I have a feeling Trump, DeSantis, etc. all wouldn't measure up to Hunter in that department if Hunter were to call their bluffs.
"Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories." - Sun Tsu, The Art of War
"Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." - Matthew 5:44
"Don't criticize what you can't understand." - Bob Dylan, The Times They Are A-Changin'
They're all saying the same thing. If one does not care, then one does not understand, and vice versa. Moreover, if that doesn't make sense to you, and if you're looking for someone to criticize that you can't understand, it would be more productive to look in the mirror.
During times when covid wasn't killing large amounts of people Florida did OK. I don't see how that offsets their failure when the covid was killing a lot.
yes
"WE" are missing the point.
covid was not that bad. what if it was something more fatal or posed a bigger threat to children? would deathsentence have reacted the same way? would the country?
We have fallen into the trap
"oh its an old person's disease"
or,
"it's a gay persons disease"
or,
"it's a black person's disease"
Do we only care when it affects WASPs? I don't get this, at all.
Florida was not as bad as it could have been. But it did help with the initial country wide spread of Covid--I mean, we can't shut down spring break. (phone data is scary).
But it also wasn't even close to being as good as it should have been. Of course, we were pretty bad as a country in our response.
As for using excess deaths--we didn't have a flu season when covid restrictions were in place.
Golack
the story did what it was intended to to
get the article about a total of 15 home insurers leaving Florida out of the news cycle. As reported by Fortune magazine
If way more people got COVID and way more died from it during the initial and the Delta spikes, then there's fewer people left to get it later and more of those remaining people have some immunity either from past infection(s) or vaccination(s). So of course it's going to decline after the shitshow he precipitated.
The fact that the mortality rate came down after a spike is interesting. But it doesn't change the fact that the spike itself--the invisible portion of the chart--represents a number of dead human beings. The chart shows unambiguously that the number of people who died from COVID in Florida is larger than it would have been if Florida's performance had consistently been in the average range. That means it shows the opposite of what Kevin suggests.