COVID does worse in warmer climates; it would be useful to see data adjusted for factors such as ventilation, climate, baseline prevalence, viral variants, etc.
No one AFAIK has attempted to do any of this work. All I've seen are unsubstantiated claims for each side's agenda.
We need to know what hard conditions guarantee an R0 small enough to prevent disease transmission in schools.
Is that really substantiated or has it just been theorized? California and Texas have been doing poorly compared to Florida so heat itself doesn’t seem to be the differing factor if it is a factor at all.
> California and Texas have been doing poorly compared to Florida so heat itself doesn’t seem to be the differing factor if it is a factor at all.
California is much colder than Florida, if you weight it by population and not land area.
Wouldn't be surprised if that is also true of Texas. Both have large tracts of sparsely populated arid, very hot land that contributes to popular image but isn't where most people live.
Also, California has not been doing poorly compared to Florida, but there are a whole lot of non-climatic differences.
Technically, it's based around the fact the virus spreads slower in summer (warm, humid) than winter (cold, dry). Though I suppose California and Texas are more (warm, dry) so maybe the union factor is dry. Or something else like population density or time spent indoors.
Note that this is Florida's official death rate which we know underestimates the real rate. The governor stepped in and made all numbers go through a special department which does things like throw out any deaths from non-residents (snowbirds and visitors).
Based on excess death counts, the real number for Florida maybe 25-100% higher. See:
Florida is currently facing a $2-$3 billion tax shortfall (numbers vary depending on the time of projection [0]) and California is facing a budget surplus [1]. There are details around this like one-off capital gains and tax rates and budget cuts, but the overall story is that FL had a slightly higher death rate than CA in exchange for an overall economy that isn't doing so well. Some of this is due to the fact that FL's economy is tourism-driven and my personal response to that is: as a tourist I was very tempted to (safely) visit FL this winter, but the whole "our state doesn't believe in basic COVID restrictions" thing made that much too scary.
They're not the same, Florida is higher. But overall Florida seems to be an outlier among the "low restriction" states and California seems to be an outlier among the "high restriction" states. A better approach would be to average the groups of states that took different approaches, and maybe also try to normalize by other confounders like population density. This is probably a better approach because there might be other pandemics in the future that are way deadlier, and we should actually know what works and what doesn't.
You wrote "to bail out California" and yet the headline says "robust budget." Do you have evidence that California was bailed out?
How much money does California give the federal government compared to that $26 billion that it got back? How much does California give vs. other states?
No one AFAIK has attempted to do any of this work. All I've seen are unsubstantiated claims for each side's agenda.
We need to know what hard conditions guarantee an R0 small enough to prevent disease transmission in schools.
There has been zero leadership here.