The Dolphins Make Me Cry.com - Forums

You guys should love this. i found this particular stat interesting ... "More than one-fifth, or 21 percent, of Florida's population is at least 65 years old with at least 4.6 million out of the state's 22 million identifying as senior citizens. Comparatively, just 15 percent of California's population is elderly with six million out of 40 million aged 65 and up."

This means more residents in Florida are susceptible to a virus that preys on the elderly

How two states with opposite COVID strategies BOTH 'bent the curve': Cases, deaths and hospitalizations plummet by 30% in a month in lockdown-loving California AND open-all-hours Florida

-California Gov Gavin Newsom took a very strict approach during the coronavirus pandemic and closed bars and indoor dining, issued mask mandates and limited gathering

-By comparison, Florida Gov Ron DeSantis has issued very few closures and said he has trusted Floridian to 'use common sense' to control the spread of the virus

-Historically, when adjusting for population, Florida has had 8,306 cases and 117 deaths per 100,000 residents and California has had about 8,499 cases per 100,000 residents and 130 deaths per 100,000

-Currently, each states is recording between 200 and 400 cases per million people and between 10 and 20 deaths per million, showing a very similar curve over the last two months

-Hospitalization rates are also very similar with California reporting 24 hospitalizations per 100,000 while Florida has recorded about 22 per 100,000

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-9262397/How-California-Florida-took-different-approaches-ended-result.html

Looks like FL has had similar results to a state with a much larger and more concentrated urban population (where infectious diseases spread more easily).  It's also worth mentioning that travelers who went to open-for-business FL to have fun (https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2020/09/17/fauci-was-right-covid-19-cases-are-rising-again-following-labor-day-weekend-travel/?sh=7f1dc2a958d7) (and get infected) then went back home and raised the infection numbers for their home states, not FL.

Left unstated in this article is how well DeSantis's plan worked: does FL have a much more vibrant economy than CA after letting Floridians do whatever they wanted?

Having Disney World open doesn’t do specifically more harm to Florida it hurts the entire country equally, because it spreads the disease nationally when people go home. 

hahaha ... you guys crack me up.

CF, I've asked this before: what is your explanation for why countries with extremely low COVID infection and death rates (like Japan, Australia, and South Korea) have done so much better at fighting COVID than the US?  It seems like you clearly don't believe their more restrictive policies had anything to do with it.

Oh, and while we're on the subject of FL's amazing COVID response, this story seems relevant:

Florida Scientist Says She Was Fired For Not Manipulating COVID-19 Data (https://www.npr.org/2020/06/29/884551391/florida-scientist-says-she-was-fired-for-not-manipulating-covid-19-data)

So if I understand the timeline correctly, this scientist from the Florida Department of Health was fired for being unwilling to "manually change numbers" back in June (and presumably replaced with another person), and since then, FL's NEW numbers have shown that actually, open-all-hours Florida is doing just as well as the states that locked down.  It's a libertarian miracle!

I think I will refer to some sage advice from another poster on this forum when it comes to trusting the numbers from governments that are trying to cook their books to present a rosy picture on COVID:

I wouldn't get too excited. She's been arrested and from what I understand more charges will follow. She isn't the innocent whistleblower she pretends to be and in fact she's as dirty as the governors of CA and NY who you people put on pedestals. hahahaha


Not sure why you are dragging other countries into a conversation about CA and FL but I guess deflection and semantics is all you've got.

She has been arrested.  But the only crime alleged is releasing information without authorization, absolutely no charge that she released false information. 

Something is weird with the COVID numbers.  I've been paying attention to the FL numbers daily and the case numbers are way down...like...way way down.  But the deaths, which are usually a 3 week lagging indicator, are not.

I'm not suggesting manipulation of numbers, but I think that people just aren't testing as much.  Maybe they're getting sick and just staying home or the introduction of the vaccine has changed people's focus.  I have a feeling that our current infection rates are quite a bit higher than what's reporter, using deaths as my starting point and extrapolating out.

I anticipate that Florida's commendable performance on reducing "COVID" deaths may be accompanied by an unexplained and tragic increase in deaths from "pneumonia," "influenza," and "other causes."

At the end of the day, you can't hide bodies.  The dead will be the dead, and cooking the books won't work.  When it comes to total deaths per capita for 2020 vs 2019, I will be happy to compare the performance of states that took steps to protect their inhabitants to the performance of states that took steps to placate Trump's ego.

Cooking the books?   How about all the hospitals reporting COVID deaths when they clearly died of other causes just so they can get more money from the federal government??  That's cooking the books if I ever saw it. 

Florida is reporting deaths truthfully.  Truth is, this is no different than SARS or H1N1 and the entire country has overreacted. 

Me! Me! I 'll try to answer this one. Is it because the citizens of those countries do what they're told, and think of their fellow citizens, and the greater good, rather than themselves only?

Hospitals get money - lots of money! - any time they treat critically ill patients, no matter what the cause, so they have little incentive to lie about the reason. Are you saying they are lying about these patients being critically ill, or that we have millions more Americans hospitalized for some other mystery reason that is being suppressed?

Even including our "unnecessary overreaction," over 300,000 more Americans died (from something) in 2020 than in 2019.  Do you think those deaths were faked? If not, why did so many more Americans die in 2020 than during the SARS or H1N1 outbreaks?

Having universal health care could be a factor too. 

I rarely post here because no one will ever change their mind on anything, but you named 2 Islands and South Korea is a peninsula that borders North Korea where there is basically no interaction between the 2 countries.

We have lots of travel and immigration, legal and otherwise in America. We are also the unhealthiest country in the world due to obesity, those are 2 big factors as to why we are worse than these 3 countries and probably a lot more.

Here are some non-island countries doing much better than the USA: Cambodia, Vietnam, Kenya, Denmark, heck even India with massive poverty and urban centers has a significantly lower death toll per population.

Actually pick pretty much any country at random and they are doing better than the USA.

This is necessarily referring to neighbors sharing a land border, because if we're also counting immigration by air or sea, then it wouldn't matter if a given country is an island or not.  So if we look at the countries that share land borders with the US - Canada and Mexico - both of them are doing better than we are.  It doesn't make sense to blame them for our failures.

I don't know that the US is "the unhealthiest country in the world" - there are many unhealthy countries that are a LOT poorer than us - but let's suppose that statement is true.  If our population is so much unhealthier than the rest of the world, shouldn't our federal, state, and local governments have been the most restrictive in the world, in order to protect our much more vulnerable population?  FL, in particular, seems like an extremely high risk given the older population of the state.