Should we mention that FL didn’t count everyone, because snowbirds had their “residence” elsewhere and were counted there even if they caught and died with it in FL.
I don’t know if there’s an article about it or not. The info I got was from my aunt and uncle who live in Naples - well, my uncle lived there before his death that is.
It has come up quite regularly in conversations both here at home and as we have traveled - esp with the mask mandate changing. We’ve ranged from VA to NY encountering other travelers from elsewhere in NY since that was a tourist destination.
We muse about whether some folks have lied or not, but to date, we haven’t met even one person involved in the conversation who has remained silent or shuffled off. This seems to be one topic where everyone wants their views known if it comes up.
Since I really enjoy “people watching” it doesn’t bother me at all to encounter someone different. It’s a curiosity.
@ Creekland: Good question. I am not sure how deaths are recorded in FL.
I live in an island community, populated disproportionately by retired folks, with a small hospital. Every week, the hospital publishes their Covid data. There have been no deaths at the hospital, so the science deniers here use that as evidence that we have had 0 Covid deaths in our community and therefore should never have had businesses closed, or masks required. You can not sway them with facts, which are that our hospital shipped all the Covid patients who required a ventilator to a bigger hospital in a neighboring county and the ones who died had their deaths recorded in those counties. Based on that, I am guessing that deaths that happen in FL are counted there.
I think for some of the vaccine reluctant people death is the defining factor. Anything less than death is NOT death so can be dealt with. (I don’t agree with this myself - at all - but this is verbiage I have read over and over again - even here on CC).
We need an easily accessible Hospitalizations per Million by state metric.
It’s helpful to use rates to understand data. California has a death rate that is 8% lower than that of Florida (1600/million versus 1741/million). We could argue about whether that is an appreciable difference. But I think if you look at the numbers by age, which I mentioned in the very sentence you quoted (somehow you inadvertently left that out) you will find that California fared worse on this metric. (Median age in California is 36.5 versus 42 in Florida.)
I will undertake to play with the numbers by age band to see if I can age-adjust the rates (might not be possible, but I’ll try).
But it might help to look at national death rates by age band for the intuition. We lost 0.013% of people <50 to COVID. The comparable number for >70 is 0.86%. Adjusting for the numbers of people in those age bands, >70 faced a rate of death 70 times that of <50. When you look at the extremes of the distribution and again adjust for demographics, 85+ faced a historical death rate of greater than 6,600 times that of people 18 or under.
Time for some gratitude from the elderly and the vulnerable for the incredible sacrifices that were made on their behalf, sacrifices that literally have never been made before in the history of civilization for a pandemic with a death rate less than 0.5% (and it’s likely significantly less than 0.50%).
I was only referring to your comment about differences in death rates by state. (I WAS looking at rate data, as in deaths per million). 141 people per million is a significant difference.
I feel like the sacrifices we made in the last year, were largely to express some gratitude to the seniors who first sacrificed for me. They do not owe me anything.
141 is 0.0141% of 1,000,000. Not significant. You really want to be looking at the percentage difference in rates, which is 8% as I mentioned, but which would surely disappear once you adjust for the age skews. The proportion of Florida’s population that is >70 is larger than that of California. Different approaches to lockdowns appear to have made little difference.
EDIT to add: 25% of Florida’s population is >65, versus only 15% of California. No reason to crunch the numbers further, California has absolutely fared worse than Florida. This is a disease of the elderly, fatality rates plotted against age are approximately log-linear for all age groups >5 years old. Thanks @lvvcsf, eyes going blurry these days lol.
It’s a difference of .0141%.
Not only do they not owe me anything, in my family we’ve been discussing all the pros we’ve had over the past year due to Covid in spite of my uncle’s death and my son being a long hauler.
I realize not everyone has pros, but ours have been such that it hasn’t really been an awful sacrifice comparatively. There are merely pros and cons. Plus we’ve learned that we can wear masks and be considerate of others without feeling any loss of freedom.
Your insistence that the elderly owe you a debt of gratitude is …. something.
Last night I caught the tail end of a program on PBS about polio and the Salk vaccine.
They had a man who had survived polio before the vaccine was available.
He spent 2.5 years in an iron lung and relearned how to breathe by using his neck muscles. There was a picture of him writing with his feet. He went on to do great things and earned a PhD. He said he has had a wonderful life.
But now that we have a polio vaccine, no one has to go through what he did.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have the same results with the Covid vaccines? That no one has to even suffer with the side effects and NO ONE needs to die from this. That would be so wonderful!
I’m pretty sure if planes were crashing and killed 600+k in such a short period of time in just one country, most people would consider it quite significant even if there are far, far more travelers than that out there.
At least now there’s a way to greatly increase one’s odds of not being in the crash. Most of those who are still dying or having bad effects from Covid have chosen their path vs the Covid lottery we used to have to play.
That’s assuming you equally trust the numbers coming out of all the states.
Impact of COVID-19 on mortality ‘significantly greater’ than data suggest, study says
Assuming we are told about them. The media/social media have been reluctant, to say the least, to admit any side effects exist besides the ones “officially” listed by the drug companies/FDA.
Where are you hearing about other side effects that aren’t being reported? Or are you speculating that there are some out there that are being ignored?
(interestingly, when I did a search for stories on the vaccine’s potential affect on menstrual cycles, I came across a number of news and medical reports, not just on the vaccine’s affect, but also on the affect of Covid, itself.)
The latter. Clotting problems, heart inflammation, menstrual issues are side effects not listed by the companies. They are receiving some press now but, for example, FB deleted a large group of users that were discussing side effects prior to these more recent articles. Why? Not saying there are more, just seems to be the inclination to squash side effects discussions.
I’m for more info and transparency. Let people discuss what they’re experiencing.
Not to mention 100,000 people died in one MONTH following the Christmas celebrations. One month. The virus has the ability to travel like wildfire. Yes, thank goodness for vaccines.
From a statistical basis, just comparing state totals is not of much value. Instead, one has to adjust for age of the individual state populations, particularly since COVID hits the elderly hardest. In other words, what is the death rate of those 80+, those 70-79, those 60-69, and the like.
Yes, as soon as you get one data point that supports your conclusion you should stop crunching numbers. There is ALWAYS reason to keep crunching numbers. You can continue to parse this out as much as you want. California’s population is 59.5% white. Florida’s population is 74% white. Florida is disproportionately populated by folks rich enough to have a 2nd home, or have moved to their chosen retirement community.
Compare WA state to FL: 69% white, vs 74% respectively (far more comparable)
*Deaths per hundred thousand by age:
65-74 WA: 258 FL: 291
75-84 WA: 602 FL: 710
85+ WA: 1599 FL: 1668
*Adjusted on per hundred thousand in each age range basis. For example: there are 1,470,202 Floridians aged 75-84 with 10,450 deaths in that age range
I’m using Florida and Washington because that’s the state in your example and the state where I live. I looked at a couple of red states with deaths/million above the median, and the differences were even more pronounced.