California vs Florida, a Covid-19 reckoning

California and Florida have a lot in common: Large populations, nice weather, beautiful beaches, celebrities, Disney theme parks, hundreds of thousands of acres of citrus orchards.
When Covid-19 came to the US in early 2020, the two states reacted similarly, shutting down in-person schooling and indoor dining and urging residents to stay home. Through some combination of that quick action, March weather that’s conducive to spending time outside and keeping windows open, and pure luck, both largely avoided the initial spring 2020 Covid wave that took so many lives in New York City and elsewhere in the Northeast. They have also had similar success in vaccinating older residents, which for the past year-plus has been by far the most effective way of preventing Covid deaths.
Yet California and Florida are widely seen as representing opposite poles of Covid policy — with some justification. According to the Oxford Covid-19 Government Response Tracker, which quantifies public-health policies on a stringency index, the states’ approaches diverged in late-summer 2020 and stayed far apart until a couple of months ago.
The divergence was most pronounced in schooling. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis ordered all Florida public schools to provide in-person instruction in fall 2020. There was resistance, and a court challenge, but according to Burbio’s
K-12 school opening tracker Florida’s percentage of in-person school days was third-highest among the states in the 2020/2021 academic year. California, where governor Gavin Newsom allowed schools to reopen in fall 2020 if local infection rates were below a certain level but few did, and the largest districts stayed remote for the entire school year, came in dead last. Other differences included a rapid return to indoor dining in Florida but not California, as well as opposite approaches to mask and vaccine mandates, with Florida’s DeSantis generally opposed (even signing legislation in November 2021 that banned most of them) and California’s Newsom in favor. Another telling contrast: Florida’s Disney World reopened in July 2020, California’s Disneyland in April 2021.
These differences, along with
all the similarities outlined above, mean that California’s and Florida’s Covid outcomes might actually shed some light on the effectiveness and side effects of their differing Covid-fighting approaches. Since March 2020 there have of course been lots of premature attempts at comparing states’ success or failure in keeping Covid in check that were made to look silly by subsequent events. This effort may be premature, too, but with US Covid deaths nearing their lowest levels since the pandemic began one can at least hope it’s not, and in any case it seems fair enough to compare California and Florida at a point when both have been through four significant waves of the disease.
Young people have been much more likely to die of Covid-19 in Florida than in California, those 75 and older slightly less likely. Because Covid is so much deadlier for the old than the young, that works out to Florida having only a slightly higher age-adjusted death rate.

—Bloomberg