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Comment by naturalauction | Hacker News Reader

>Also should note, I can't help but feel this focus on Florida, Texas, Arkansas, etc is because they have banned masks and vaccine mandates. If you look at actual hospitalizations and more importantly death rates you see something different.

But this is in the past (or cumulative over the whole pandemic), the news article is talking about now.

If you look at current numbers, you can see where hospitalizations are now. See https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html

FL and AR seem to be hotspots to me

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You're both correct. What is being missed is that, partly because of less social-distancing, FL and the MO/AR/LA region are getting hit first, so you can point to the problems there this week. The media dishonesty is that they won't come back next week or in two weeks and give attention to the equivalent problems in VA, OR, WA, etc. The passive headline-reader, who throughout 2020 and 2021 has seen sob story after sob story about South Dakota, Texas, and Florida, must really scratch their heads when looking at the cumulative death rates and wonder how they ended up being so far from the top, when practically 100% of the reported problems were always in those states.

The higher death rates in NJ/NY etc were due to COVID being new, and treatments being unknown or experimental. The death rates in South Dakota were because idiots felt the need to clog a small town with 500K cyclists despite warnings from almost every reliable epidemiologist.

It's the difference between getting surprised by a deadly bug, and having state governments that don't give a crap despite being forewarned.

I don't know where you get this idea that delta is going to hit blue states after red states. Blue states are open. I haven't worn a mask since before I started hearing about delta.

Delta is here in my blue state and the neighboring ones, cases here have gone up, but people aren't dying. Because of high vaccination rates it's not news here the way it was last year and we're staying open.

You're inventing this "dishonesty."

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