Is DeSantis worse than trump?
DaveSchmidt said:
Smedley said:
And as that blog states: "In the end, some states that adopted dramatically divergent policies had comparable outcomes (Florida and California, for example)."
Regarding that specific citation: When I look at the bubble chart, I see a California bubble whose center is noticeably lower than Florida’s, maybe a difference of about 25 deaths per 100,000 population. The ranking below the chart confirms it: a difference of 24.
What it means is this: If California’s population had died at Florida’s rate, about 9,600 more lives would have been lost — a real-world translation of “comparable.”
What do you think of DeSantis' covid policies (or lack thereof)? Do you think the data supports the notion that there was a clear failure of leadership, and Florida should have been more like CA/NY/NJ in its covid policies?
Do you think that Winter weather could impact transmission/death rates in the northern areas? What about considering when the deaths occurred along the COVID-19 timeline?
Smedley said:
DaveSchmidt said:
Smedley said:
And as that blog states: "In the end, some states that adopted dramatically divergent policies had comparable outcomes (Florida and California, for example)."
Regarding that specific citation: When I look at the bubble chart, I see a California bubble whose center is noticeably lower than Florida’s, maybe a difference of about 25 deaths per 100,000 population. The ranking below the chart confirms it: a difference of 24.
What it means is this: If California’s population had died at Florida’s rate, about 9,600 more lives would have been lost — a real-world translation of “comparable.”
What do you think of DeSantis' covid policies (or lack thereof)? Do you think the data supports the notion that there was a clear failure of leadership, and Florida should have been more like CA/NY/NJ in its covid policies?
That's kind of beside the point. I imagine the Dr. Fauci, the CDC, the Chinese Govt, etc., etc., would do some things differently if faced with another Covid-type pandemic. The problem with DeSantis is turning these mistakes into a criminal investigation purely for political gain.
Steve said:
Do you think that Winter weather could impact transmission/death rates in the northern areas? What about considering when the deaths occurred along the COVID-19 timeline?
Both may well be valid. To be sure, there are a lot of factors and moving parts wrt Covid analysis, and there is a ton of data, some of which is contradictory.
But if one is going to argue that DeSantis did it all wrong, one needs the data to clearly and definitively show Florida had a bad end result vis a vis other states. The data on age-adjusted Covid deaths that shows FL was slightly better than average undermines that argument.
Which brings it back to my question: what was better Covid policy: lockdowns, closures and strict mask mandates every which way for an eternity, or a relatively easy, hands-off policy — if both resulted in about the same outcomes?
tjohn said:
Smedley said:
DaveSchmidt said:
Smedley said:
And as that blog states: "In the end, some states that adopted dramatically divergent policies had comparable outcomes (Florida and California, for example)."
Regarding that specific citation: When I look at the bubble chart, I see a California bubble whose center is noticeably lower than Florida’s, maybe a difference of about 25 deaths per 100,000 population. The ranking below the chart confirms it: a difference of 24.
What it means is this: If California’s population had died at Florida’s rate, about 9,600 more lives would have been lost — a real-world translation of “comparable.”
What do you think of DeSantis' covid policies (or lack thereof)? Do you think the data supports the notion that there was a clear failure of leadership, and Florida should have been more like CA/NY/NJ in its covid policies?
That's kind of beside the point. I imagine the Dr. Fauci, the CDC, the Chinese Govt, etc., etc., would do some things differently if faced with another Covid-type pandemic. The problem with DeSantis is turning these mistakes into a criminal investigation purely for political gain.
I was addressing posts from earlier today that were critical about DeSantis’s Covid policies in general.
I agree this “investigation” is largely political grandstanding and entirely unnecessary.
Smedley said:
Both may well be valid. To be sure, there are a lot of factors and moving parts wrt Covid analysis, and there is a ton of data, some of which is contradictory.
But if one is going to argue that DeSantis did it all wrong, one needs the data to clearly and definitively show Florida had a bad end result vis a vis other states. The data on age-adjusted Covid deaths that shows FL was slightly better than average undermines that argument.
Which brings it back to my question: what was better Covid policy: lockdowns, closures and strict mask mandates every which way for an eternity, or a relatively easy, hands-off policy — if both resulted in about the same outcomes?
Nobody ever suggested "for eternity".
But don't take my word or any else's word here for anything. If you really want to know if FL's COVID response was as effective as it could have been, do your own good faith research. Emphasis on "good faith."
Smedley said:
Both may well be valid. To be sure, there are a lot of factors and moving parts wrt Covid analysis, and there is a ton of data, some of which is contradictory.
But if one is going to argue that DeSantis did it all wrong, one needs the data to clearly and definitively show Florida had a bad end result vis a vis other states. The data on age-adjusted Covid deaths that shows FL was slightly better than average undermines that argument.
Which brings it back to my question: what was better Covid policy: lockdowns, closures and strict mask mandates every which way for an eternity, or a relatively easy, hands-off policy — if both resulted in about the same outcomes?
The fact is that DeSantis made his covid decisions based on politics, not on science.
This makes him wrong and horrible, regardless of the outcomes. (which may or not be as your blogger friend contends.)
ETA: Also, the death rate is not necessarily the defining metric. Given the effects of long covid, infection rate is also important.
drummerboy said:
The fact is that DeSantis made his covid decisions based on politics, not on science.
This makes him wrong and horrible, regardless of the outcomes. (which may or not be as your blogger friend contends.)
ETA: Also, the death rate is not necessarily the defining metric. Given the effects of long covid, infection rate is also important.
the overall infection and death rates aren't entirely comparable as I wrote earlier. Look at the number of cases and fatalities in NJ for instance. There was a huge spike before we even knew what we were dealing with. But by April/May of 2020 we had a pretty good idea of what to do to keep from getting sick. And in some states, governments refused to put all of those mitigation efforts in place. And as a result preventable cases occurred.
and there also is this weird notion that states like NJ had some sort of draconian "lockdowns." We were never "locked down". Retail businesses never closed during the pandemic, so most of us went out for groceries or other necessities from the very beginning. Restaurants and bars opened for outdoor dining by the beginning of July, 2020. Indoor spaces started opening after vaccines were introduced, although at reduced capacity.
Lots of other businesses stayed closed because most people didn't WANT to go to a theater or concert hall if it meant getting sick.
Sure we had mask mandates throughout that have only been completely lifted relatively recently. But as much as some people whined about it, wearing a mask in enclosed spaces was a pretty light lift.
Ron DeSantis -- the guy who didn't make you wear a mask! What courage!
DeSantis and the other Covidiots want to send the fact that people died (including, among the many, two of my wife's co-workers and the owner of my Mom's favorite restaurant) "down the Memory Hole".
nohero said:
DeSantis and the other Covidiots want to send the fact that people died (including, among the many, two of my wife's co-workers and the owner of my Mom's favorite restaurant) "down the Memory Hole".
there also seems to be an idea that because the disease claimed elderly people at a much higher rate, it's not so bad if they are the ones who died. The idea of age-adjusted death rates implies just that. If anything, we might have expected states like FL that has a significant sized elderly population would have had more restrictions in place than they did to protect that group of people. I'm not sure why we should shrug off the death of a 75 year old person or an 80 year old person just because they might have only lived 5 or 6 or 7 more years. When it comes down to it, none of us knows how many years we have left to live.
ml1 said:
Smedley said:
Both may well be valid. To be sure, there are a lot of factors and moving parts wrt Covid analysis, and there is a ton of data, some of which is contradictory.
But if one is going to argue that DeSantis did it all wrong, one needs the data to clearly and definitively show Florida had a bad end result vis a vis other states. The data on age-adjusted Covid deaths that shows FL was slightly better than average undermines that argument.
Which brings it back to my question: what was better Covid policy: lockdowns, closures and strict mask mandates every which way for an eternity, or a relatively easy, hands-off policy — if both resulted in about the same outcomes?Nobody ever suggested "for eternity".
But don't take my word or any else's word here for anything. If you really want to know if FL's COVID response was as effective as it could have been, do your own good faith research. Emphasis on "good faith."
A rather cryptic response that vaguely and oddly insinuates dishonesty on my part, but with no real substance.
Of course FL's Covid response wasn't as good as it could have been. Nor was the response of any other state, or the federal government, for that matter. But my point is that even in FL was middle of the pack ish in Covid numbers at the end of the day, that's a political win for DeSantis.
Can you, as a supporter of blue-state Covid policies and a critic of laissez faire Covid policies, "in good faith" say that you aren't surprised that FL had fewer age-adjusted Covid deaths than NJ and NY did? Emphasis on "good faith".
ml1 said:
The idea of age-adjusted death rates implies just that.
To me the idea implies nothing more than an acknowledgment of the third line in this CDC chart.
drummerboy said:
Smedley said:
Both may well be valid. To be sure, there are a lot of factors and moving parts wrt Covid analysis, and there is a ton of data, some of which is contradictory.
But if one is going to argue that DeSantis did it all wrong, one needs the data to clearly and definitively show Florida had a bad end result vis a vis other states. The data on age-adjusted Covid deaths that shows FL was slightly better than average undermines that argument.
Which brings it back to my question: what was better Covid policy: lockdowns, closures and strict mask mandates every which way for an eternity, or a relatively easy, hands-off policy — if both resulted in about the same outcomes?The fact is that DeSantis made his covid decisions based on politics, not on science.
This makes him wrong and horrible, regardless of the outcomes. (which may or not be as your blogger friend contends.)
ETA: Also, the death rate is not necessarily the defining metric. Given the effects of long covid, infection rate is also important.
My "blogger friend" lol. That blog was based on some pretty robust data if you ask me. If you have specific issues with their methodology or their political leanings which cast doubt on their findings, please share.
ml1 said:
nohero said:
DeSantis and the other Covidiots want to send the fact that people died (including, among the many, two of my wife's co-workers and the owner of my Mom's favorite restaurant) "down the Memory Hole".
there also seems to be an idea that because the disease claimed elderly people at a much higher rate, it's not so bad if they are the ones who died. The idea of age-adjusted death rates implies just that. If anything, we might have expected states like FL that has a significant sized elderly population would have had more restrictions in place than they did to protect that group of people. I'm not sure why we should shrug off the death of a 75 year old person or an 80 year old person just because they might have only lived 5 or 6 or 7 more years. When it comes down to it, none of us knows how many years we have left to live.
Well it seems even our good state doesn't give a hoot about older people dying, because they use age-adjusted numbers too.
https://www.nj.gov/health/cd/documents/topics/NCOV/COVID-Age_Adjusted_Race_Ethnicity.pdf
"Age-adjusting is a way to make fairer comparisons between groups with different age distributions. For example, a county with a higher percentage of elderly people is expected to have a higher crude (unadjusted) death rate than a county with a younger population. Therefore, it is often important to control for differences among the age distributions of populations when making comparisons among rates to assess the risk. Age-adjustment is a statistical method to remove differences caused by different age distributions, so that the rates are based on the same age structure."
Who knew Phil was so heartless?
Shouldn't we really be looking at, among other things, excess deaths over the COVID-19 timeline to see which policies likely led to the best results?
Smedley said:
ml1 said:
Smedley said:
Both may well be valid. To be sure, there are a lot of factors and moving parts wrt Covid analysis, and there is a ton of data, some of which is contradictory.
But if one is going to argue that DeSantis did it all wrong, one needs the data to clearly and definitively show Florida had a bad end result vis a vis other states. The data on age-adjusted Covid deaths that shows FL was slightly better than average undermines that argument.
Which brings it back to my question: what was better Covid policy: lockdowns, closures and strict mask mandates every which way for an eternity, or a relatively easy, hands-off policy — if both resulted in about the same outcomes?Nobody ever suggested "for eternity".
But don't take my word or any else's word here for anything. If you really want to know if FL's COVID response was as effective as it could have been, do your own good faith research. Emphasis on "good faith."
A rather cryptic response that vaguely and oddly insinuates dishonesty on my part, but with no real substance.
Of course FL's Covid response wasn't as good as it could have been. Nor was the response of any other state, or the federal government, for that matter. But my point is that even in FL was middle of the pack ish in Covid numbers at the end of the day, that's a political win for DeSantis.
Can you, as a supporter of blue-state Covid policies and a critic of laissez faire Covid policies, "in good faith" say that you aren't surprised that FL had fewer age-adjusted Covid deaths than NJ and NY did? Emphasis on "good faith".
With the advantage of the first wave of COVID hitting states like FL later, they should have had far fewer cases than states like NY or NJ if they used the knowledge that had already been gained from the early part of the pandemic. It's actually surprising they didn't have far fewer cases than states like ours, because they could have benefited from our experience. Look at the charts of when deaths occurred in FL.
Smedley said:
ml1 said:
nohero said:
DeSantis and the other Covidiots want to send the fact that people died (including, among the many, two of my wife's co-workers and the owner of my Mom's favorite restaurant) "down the Memory Hole".
there also seems to be an idea that because the disease claimed elderly people at a much higher rate, it's not so bad if they are the ones who died. The idea of age-adjusted death rates implies just that. If anything, we might have expected states like FL that has a significant sized elderly population would have had more restrictions in place than they did to protect that group of people. I'm not sure why we should shrug off the death of a 75 year old person or an 80 year old person just because they might have only lived 5 or 6 or 7 more years. When it comes down to it, none of us knows how many years we have left to live.
Well it seems even our good state doesn't give a hoot about older people dying, because they use age-adjusted numbers too.
https://www.nj.gov/health/cd/documents/topics/NCOV/COVID-Age_Adjusted_Race_Ethnicity.pdf
"Age-adjusting is a way to make fairer comparisons between groups with different age distributions. For example, a county with a higher percentage of elderly people is expected to have a higher crude (unadjusted) death rate than a county with a younger population. Therefore, it is often important to control for differences among the age distributions of populations when making comparisons among rates to assess the risk. Age-adjustment is a statistical method to remove differences caused by different age distributions, so that the rates are based on the same age structure."
Who knew Phil was so heartless?
it's been pretty well-known for about 2 years that NJ's early COVID policies were very harsh on elderly people. So I'm not surprised Murphy was making excuses for it. I'm not sure why you think I would give him a pass. Because he's a Democrat?
and again, DeSantis and other governors should have been able to do a better job protecting their citizens, after seeing the initial botched responses in NY and NJ.
DaveSchmidt said:
ml1 said:
The idea of age-adjusted death rates implies just that.
To me the idea implies nothing more than an acknowledgment of the third line in this CDC chart.
poor writing on my part. The highlighting of age-adjusted rates to make the argument that a state's response was good because young people weren't dying at the same rate as older folks (whether by Phil Murphy or others) doesn't strike me as all that convincing. Actions like the early NJ policy of sending people back to nursing homes to infect other residents were really bad, regardless of the fact that they didn't result in widespread death of younger people.
Steve said:
Shouldn't we really be looking at, among other things, excess deaths over the COVID-19 timeline to see which policies likely led to the best results?
Because excess deaths are an estimation, and vary depending on the methodology behind the estimate, they are subject to more judgment calls than some other data and may be harder to standardize across states for comparisons.
DaveSchmidt said:
Because excess deaths are an estimation, and vary depending on the methodology behind the estimate, they are subject to more judgment calls than some other data and may be harder to standardize across states for comparisons.
you got a better metric? It’s a frequently used metric by those in the field to determine the impact of the disease.
It’s interesting how this got derailed into a discussion about Covid deaths in New Jersey versus Florida. Frankly, I think the more salient point is that Ron DeSantis has completely flipped his status vis-à-vis vaccinations. They were clearly something that helped stem the tide of illness and death, and he was a staunch supporter when they became available. He’s now taking an opportunistic approach to try to court Covid deniers into his primary base.
Steve said:
you got a better metric? It’s a frequently used metric by those in the field to determine the impact of the disease.
Sorry, I didn’t realize the question you posed required an additional step.
I’m no specialist, but Bioinformatics CRO apparently decided it got a better metric: “We generated the plot and table using the CDC’s Provisional COVID-19 Death Counts by Sex, Age, and State database, which sourced its data from death certificates. These numbers are more consistently processed across states, though they may differ slightly from other sources.”
As for whether DeSantis is worse than Trump, for me it still comes down to what the implications are for democracy. I think many of DeSantis' policies are terrible, and have caused great harm and will cause greater harm if he were to be president. But that's the risk with democracy -- that we collectively make a bad decision and give power to someone like that. The question is, when we collectively realize that was a mistake, are we able to undo that? With Trump, he tried very hard to make the answer to that "no" -- literally staging a coup attempt. Would that be true if, god forbid, the country elected DeSantis?
PVW said:
As for whether DeSantis is worse than Trump, for me it still comes down to what the implications are for democracy. I think many of DeSantis' policies are terrible, and have caused great harm and will cause greater harm if he were to be president. But that's the risk with democracy -- that we collectively make a bad decision and give power to someone like that. The question is, when we collectively realize that was a mistake, are we able to undo that? With Trump, he tried very hard to make the answer to that "no" -- literally staging a coup attempt. Would that be true if, god forbid, the country elected DeSantis?
It's not just DeSantis' policies. Look at his actions - his scheme to fly migrants from Texas to Massachusetts by misusing a Florida program, his new embrace of anti-vax and anti-CDC propaganda for political purposes, to take two examples.
He is willing to literally lie, cheat and steal, for his political gains (more so than "typical" politicians lying about their positions).
mrincredible said:
It’s interesting how this got derailed into a discussion about Covid deaths in New Jersey versus Florida. Frankly, I think the more salient point is that Ron DeSantis has completely flipped his status vis-à-vis vaccinations. They were clearly something that helped stem the tide of illness and death, and he was a staunch supporter when they became available. He’s now taking an opportunistic approach to try to court Covid deniers into his primary base.
it's isn't really derailed. This is a going to be a central theme for DeSantis -- "Look, we had freedom in Florida, and our rate of death wasn't any worse than those lib states!"
If there was going to be an honest discussion of this issue it would that DeSantis and his supporters would just say it was a calculation. People in FL were dead set against a lot of pandemic restrictions, and politically it was a smart move for DeSantis to react to that. But the other part of the calculation for DeSantis was that more people (admittedly most of them elderly) were likely to get COVID and die.
All of the regulations were a calculation of risk vs. benefit, in every state. DeSantis chose more risk, but he likes to pretend that wasn't true, that we could have had all the "freedom" we wanted with no consequences.
DaveSchmidt said:
Sorry, I didn’t realize the question you posed required an additional step.
I’m no specialist, but Bioinformatics CRO apparently decided it got a better metric: “We generated the plot and table using the CDC’s Provisional COVID-19 Death Counts by Sex, Age, and State database, which sourced its data from death certificates. These numbers are more consistently processed across states, though they may differ slightly from other sources.”
But how does this show the impact of COVID policies on the death rate? Isn't that the discussion that we're having? At the beginning, when no one really knew how to deal with COVID, NY and NJ were suffering through the worst of it (death wise, at least). What did we know when FL was suffering through it's deaths - even on an age adjusted rate?
Professor Krugman writes a lot better than I do (of course), and he clearly made the point I've been trying to make here about DeSantis's political calculations and the results:
You can, by the way, see the same patterns at the level of whole states. For example, although New York was hit hard in the first months of the pandemic (before we knew how the coronavirus spread or what precautions to take), since May 2021 more than twice as many people have died of Covid in Florida than in New York. Even taking Florida’s slightly larger and much older population into account, that’s thousands of excess deaths in the Sunshine State.
Sounds like Krugman agrees with me about looking at excess deaths over time.
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Regarding that specific citation: When I look at the bubble chart, I see a California bubble whose center is noticeably lower than Florida’s, maybe a difference of about 25 deaths per 100,000 population. The ranking below the chart confirms it: a difference of 24.
What it means is this: If California’s population had died at Florida’s rate, about 9,600 more lives would have been lost — a real-world translation of “comparable.”