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Comment by DaiPlusPlus | Hacker News Reader

But why Florida, though? I can understand more rural states, but has the GOP made a spreadsheet that determined the number of elderly GOP voters who will die by reopening early will be cancelled-out by younger swing-voters who would vote for Trump's second-term because they reopened Florida early? Or do the models suggest that they'll die _after_ the election? Or will they do early re-openings only in Dem-leaning population centers?

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Show me the data that indicates states that have opened in the last two weeks are experiencing spiking positives for the virus.

Sure, I'll wait.

Wait no longer! Here you go: https://www.forbes.com/sites/carlieporterfield/2020/05/15/te...

Yes, there was a spike of 56 new deaths reported on the 15th.

Due to reopening? More likely due to noisy data. There was a similar spike of 50 new deaths reported on April 30th, before Texas reopened.

And after the 15th, the numbers reverted to the mean: 33 on the 16th, 31 on the 17th.

https://covidtracking.com/data/state/texas

The US media don't care about details like this, because they're not interested in actually informing people. They've been doing things like cherry-picking clusters related to meat processing plants that weren't covered by the lockdown anyway, blaming them on the lockdown being lifted, and wording their headlines to make it sound like there was a state-wide spike - and there's a very noticeable partisan bias in which states they're doing this to as well.

Looking at the data for Texas holistically, it's unclear that there is a change in the trend in the last few weeks.

In general I think this whole idealogical battle over reopening is really dumb. There isn't going to be either a significant economic recovery or a spike in cases, because only a tiny minority of people are going to actually behave the way they did before the shutdowns. Most people are still not going to engage in activities that really spread the virus significantly (densely pack restaurants, large indoor gatherings) and many, many people will wear masks.

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