Fixing some bugs, looking at Florida

A few years later and the site is still mostly working, yay! However, I missed some bugs I introduced in the last big change.

Also, the NY Times no longer updating their data and covid is no longer a pandemic. Plus, states were sort of random in when they stopped updating their data, so some of the graphs are a little wonky. Need to ponder how to fix that.

It’s also a chance to check in on the ultimate Florida Man Governor Ron DeSantis. DeSantis wants to be President really, really bad. Like, “Kevin McCarthy wants a gavel”-bad. How many extra Floridians died because of that desire? Obviously, experts will weigh in, but we can look at a few graphs and make some pretty good guesses.

Population Fatality Rate

Let’s start with population fatality rate, e.g. what percentage of your population has been killed by covid?

So, what happened?

First, Summer Happened

DeSantis kept saying everything was fine. It wasn’t. Each summer, Florida saw significantly higher per capita case totals than average. Worth noting, Utah saw very similar per capita infection rates to Florida.

Note that the average-of-averages is calculated slightly differently in this graph, so different exact values than the prior graph.

Second, COVID Kills In Florida

Along with higher infection rates, Florida case fatality rates are higher than the national average. So, more Floridians catch covid and their survival rates are lower.

California really shows the effect of vaccines, with the variant fatality spikes starting until vaccination rates caught up. Florida has a much higher case fatality rate.

Florida really stands out, because if you look at the overall trend, what you see is case fatality rates converging. This matches expectations, since absent hospital overpopulation pressures, the folks dying now are the unvaccinated and high risk.

Those differences in infection rates and case fatality rates really add up. Across the dataset, what you see is 200,000 extra deaths in the United States — almost 40% of the total fatalities in more Republican regions. 200,000 Americans who wouldn’t have died from covid.

So there you go. DeSantis — a presumptive Presidential candidate — made intentional decisions that killed tens of thousands of the people he’s taken an oath to protect. I hope some media outlets will do more rigorous dives into this data than I did.

Note: imported from Covid Proxima. Click here to see all the interactive elements.