The trends in COVID-19 cases are finally starting to deviate in California and Florida which are open all the time.
California now sees about half as many new COVID-19 cases per day compared to Florida, an analysis by the Financial Times data from Johns Hopkins University.
On Wednesday, California saw 5,750 new cases – or about 14 per 100,000 people in the population – and 1,084 deaths, with a test positivity rate of 3.45 percent.
In Florida, test positivity was nearly twice as high, at 6.76 percent, according to COVID Tracking Project data. The state saw 7,128 new cases – nearly 27 per capita – and 127 additional deaths.
Parallel trends between the two states last month left public health experts like Jeff Zients, Biden’s adviser, puzzled over how a state that implements the strictest and most protracted measures in the state (California) could not do better than Florida. , who never imposed mask mandate.
Experts believe that closures are probably no longer as useful now as they were at the beginning of the pandemic, but the new data suggest that California does have an advantage over Florida.
New cases of COVID-19 in California (blue) began to decline more sharply than in late January in Florida (green). The state on the West Coast on Wednesday saw about 14 new infections per capita, compared to 27 per capita in Florida
On January 1, with the increase in cases after the Thanksgiving Covid still flooding the U.S. and the second wave after the holidays just starting to crash, California saw almost twice as many cases as Florida.
As of the first day of 2021, California has seen about 90 new coronavirus infections per capita, compared to the 49 in Florida.
Home orders in California were just renewed ‘indefinitely’ on December 29, effectively locking in millions of people in Southern California.
Meanwhile, Florida did more or less business as usual. In fact, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has extended an executive order that barred local governments in his state from imposing any restrictions that could put residents out of work or close businesses.
According to a Wallethub analysis, Florida has the sixth most lax COVID-19 restrictions in the country. According to his statistics, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Iowa and Arkansas have fewer restrictions on things like eating and wearing masks.
Yet for a moment it fared better than California.
New cases in California and Florida are still going down, as they have been since the beginning of January, but the decline in the state on the West Coast is much better than the Sunshine State.
Since Feb. 10, new cases per capita in California have dropped by half, from 29 per 100,000 people to 14 as of Wednesday.
Florida is COVID-19 slower.
Yesterday, the state recorded 27 new cases per capita, up from 35 on February 10th.
It’s still a significant drop – from 23 percent – but is certainly not as depressing.
The switch took place late last month. The per capita cases were lower and lower in Florida, but California was in a real freefall (although the decline eased a bit there as well).
Suddenly, daily cases in California have fallen below those in Florida, and the gap is widening.
On January 25, Governor Newsom lifted the home orders that apply to Southern California.
For now, the decline in business is still strong and sustained. Cases also continue to fall in Florida.
But both states face a potential turnaround.
Florida has more cases of the B117 ‘super-covid’ variant of the UK than any other state in the country, with 489.
California has less than half as many, but has the second largest number of B117 cases in the U.S., with 204.
Well-known Fred Hutchinson researcher, Dr Trevor Bedford, said last week that the two states should be the ones predicting how the variants of the pandemic in the US could affect more broadly.
And California has a new problem: a homemade variant that experts say will make up 90 percent of cases in the state next month, and which, according to a small set of data, could be more deadly.
