> Comparing, Florida did substantially better than New York for the first 10% of the time since the pandemic started. For the second half of 2020 New York had l

> Comparing, Florida did substantially better than New York for the first 10% of the time since the pandemic started. For the second half of 2020 New York had less than half the death rate of Florida. In the first half of 2021 they were close. That's unique to New York, which had a particularly skewed distribution. Compare to Illinois (which also had severe restrictions), where most of the mortality was in winter 2020: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/illinois/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/illinois/ Or to California (same pattern), which has a higher age-adjusted mortality rate than FL, despite some of the most ridiculously over-the-top restrictions in the country: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/california/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/california/ Or to Pennsylvania, which is similar overall: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/pennsylvania/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/pennsylvania/ You really have to cherry-pick the data to make the argument that this is because of policy decisions around NPIs. The patterns being described here have as much to do with seasonality as anything else, and if you don't control for that fact, then any argument is simply pointless. That's all I'm saying. These simple narratives that "Florida didn't do $my_preferred_intervention, and look how that turned out!" are far more heat than light. If $preferred_intervention were really as effective as claimed, then it would be simply unambiguous that they're doing worse. Instead, they're about mid-pack for overall mortality. In the big natural experiment of Covid responses, there's no clear signal that anything works, other than vaccination. > Then, in the era of widespread vaccine availability New York has dropped an order of magnitude from where they were in the first half of 2021 whereas Florida has merely dropped about 20%. OK. I'm not entirely sure what point you're trying to make with this. Is it that Florida isn't vaccinating people, and that's why the mortality rate is higher in summer 2021? Florida is at 66% partial vaccination, vs. New York's 69.9%: https://www.mayoclinic.org/coronavirus-covid-19/vaccine-tracker https://www.mayoclinic.org/coronavirus-covid-19/vaccine-trac... Again, seasonality plays a huge role here, and the media narrative is hyperbolic. I expect that the northeastern states will see a mortality increase in the fall, because they always do, even before SARS-CoV2. Meanwhile, Florida's wave will probably fall.