California and Florida took opposite approaches to dealing with COVID-19. The Golden State imposed a yearlong — and ongoing — lockdown and mask mandate, while the Sunshine State, after a brief shutdown, has been wide open.
All the “experts” said that California Governor Gavin Newsom’s (D) policies were the ones to follow if the coronavirus were to be checked. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R), meanwhile, was savaged in the press for allegedly ignoring “the science.”
The experts, as it turns out, were wrong. “Despite their differing approaches,” reports the Associated Press, “California and Florida have experienced almost identical outcomes in COVID-19 case rates.” The same goes for their death rates. (Both rates, of course, have been wildly inflated by a combination of false-positive test results and the classification of just about any death as COVID-related.)
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), both California and Florida experienced a COVID-19 case rate of about 8,900 per 100,000 people. Their death rates, too, were almost the same: California had 1,413 deaths per million, and Florida had 1,503 deaths per million.
Moreover, given that Florida has the fifth-oldest population among the 50 states and California has the eighth-youngest, Florida’s death rate is actually far superior to California’s. The aged, after all, are the most vulnerable to the virus. “It’s also worth noting that California’s death rate has surged throughout the winter, while Florida’s has not,” observed Clay Travis. “In other words, California may end up passing Florida in COVID deaths before the final tally is complete.”
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Both governors, naturally, claim success for their own policies.
“While so many other states kept locking people down over these many months, Florida lifted people up,” DeSantis said in his State of the State address.
“Every business in Florida has the right to operate,” he declared. “Over these many months we’ve stood up for small, family-owned businesses and saved thousands of them from ruin.”
Florida’s unemployment rate is 5.1 percent.
Newsom, whose state unemployment rate of 9.3 percent is surely one of the factors behind the drive to recall him, claimed in his own State of the State speech, “People are alive today because of the public health decisions we made — lives saved because of your sacrifice.” His decisions, he asserted, were based on “science and data.”
Obviously, both men can’t be right. Either lockdowns and mask mandates save lives, or they don’t. If imposing them doesn’t seem to make any difference, they must not.
Other states with contrasting policies prove it. Writes the AP:
Connecticut and South Dakota are another example. Both rank among the 10 worst states for COVID-19 death rates. Yet Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont, a Democrat, imposed numerous statewide restrictions over the past year after an early surge in deaths, while South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a Republican, issued no mandates as virus deaths soared in the fall.
Travis points out that Texas, “which has also adopted far less stringent measures than California,” nevertheless has a similar death rate to the Golden State. And, he adds, lockdown-happy New York has “what would be the highest COVID death rate in the world if New York was [sic] a standalone country.”
Much of this information has been readily available for months. But only now, when Joe Biden is in the White House and many states are finally reopening, is it making its way into the mainstream media. Why?
Travis thinks he knows:
Because then the “experts” who have told us we had to shut down for the past year to fight COVID would have to acknowledge that most of their COVID safety protocols were cosmetic theater with virtually no tangible impact. And they’d have to suddenly answer to the tens of millions of parents whose children have been out of school for a year and answer to the tens of millions of people who lost their jobs or their businesses, and they’d have to acknowledge that states like California got it completely wrong by following the “expert” advice.
That, of course, they dare not do, for to do so would be to concede their own irrelevance — and perhaps to invite recriminations for all the destruction they have wreaked in the name of saving lives.
