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Comment by labster | Hacker News Reader

There is still coronavirus in California, but mostly in the flyover counties. The high population centers are much safer.

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And if California had the same death rate as Florida, there'd be an additional 40k dead people. These things aren't remotely symmetrical and it's such a disservice to pretend like "both sides are bad".

If you re-read my post above though, I'm not saying they're symmetrical. But to me it's striking that one state put in severe restrictions on business/etc for over a year, and the other state just pretended there was no pandemic, and yet California's did not even halve the case/death rates compared to Florida (per capita).

So the question California dares not ask itself is: were all the restrictions actually necessary? Maybe small businesses could have been allowed to open sooner with a mask + ventilation requirement, for example. Or maybe a single, uniform policy did not make sense for the enormously-varied state. But you can't ask those questions.

If you look at California on a county-by-county basis the restrictions definitely did halve the death rate (and beyond). The counties in California that behaved more like Florida were rewarded with a great deal more death. San Francisco, which had not only tough restrictions but high compliance, had the lowest Covid-19 death rate of any metro in the country.

Florida has a much older population so you’d need to adjust for that.

Plus Florida has moved on since 8 months ago. No everything is measured in only covid deaths.

Moved on what?

FL had record breaking deaths 2 months ago.

Moved on from restrictions. Accepted that Covid is never going away and putting life on hold isn't a good trade off.

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Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Also: please make your substantive points without flamebait. Your comment here would be fine without the last sentence.

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