Meanwhile, in SoCal, basically nobody followed the mask mandates and social distancing restrictions. The rules were more like guidelines, and guidelines that were ignored. They also have a lot more problems with overcrowding, with immigrant populations that need to work, etc. So in terms of what people were actually doing, SoCal was actually engaging in significantly riskier behavior than Florida.
If you compare Bay Area, where people largely did follow the mask & social distancing guidelines, with Florida or SoCal, the death rates are not the same. SF and San Mateo counties had approximately 1/3 as many deaths/1M as the U.S. (and Florida) average; Santa Clara had about 1/2 as many.
As a healthy 30-something, my chance of dying from COVID is about 1:3000, about 300x better than an 80-year-old. However, my chance of being hospitalized from COVID is about 3%, which is only about 7x better than the 80-year-old. The hospitals were overwhelmed, here (Bay Area) and in many other cities. Even now (2 months after the Christmas/January surge) Santa Clara County still has 21% of its ICU beds taken up by COVID patients.
U.S. life expectancy dropped by a full year during COVID. We were concerned about the 0.1 year declines in 2016-2018 from the opioid epidemic (which did affect young people), and this was 10x that. It'll be interesting to see how all-cause mortality has varied among different states in 2020-2021.
Huh? I’m from SoCal and almost everyone wears masks here all the time, all shops require masks on entrances, so I’m not sure where this narrative comes from?
The thing SF screwed up worst was opening indoor restaurants/bars for a couple months in the Autumn, which alongside holiday gatherings/winter weather resulted in a more than 10x increase in cases during that time (thankfully starting from a very low baseline). I would guess that mistake is responsible for more than half of all Covid deaths in the city, as both before and after that period (after suitably offsetting the data by a couple weeks to account for delay between action and visible outcomes) case rates were steadily declining.
SF also did a poor job, especially early on, at getting targeted testing and outreach to working class neighborhoods.
