On Friday, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a study of the nation’s more than 3,000 counties that found that mask mandates were linked to a significant reduction in COVID-19 deaths. “And conversely, had Florida been practicing California’s more rigorous attention to masking and physical distancing, curtailing indoor dining, et cetera, it would have followed a death rate trajectory that would have been the same or lower than California … because their vulnerability index was lower.” “If California had behaved like Florida, where mask use and physical distancing was not being practiced as thoroughly, our cumulative death rate would have been higher than Florida,” UCLA medical epidemiologist Dr. An additional 38,000 Californians would be dead if the state’s per-capita deaths matched Arizona’s. Arizona, which has lax restrictions similar to Florida’s, has the nation’s fifth-highest COVID-19 death rate. And in the fall, there may have been an extra-contagious strain of the virus circulating locally that further complicated matters.īecause of the many ways California is more susceptible to coronavirus spread, replicating Florida’s relaxed approach may have had devastating consequences here. Researchers are still learning about how climate affects the coronavirus, but some studies suggest that when the air is humid, virus droplets fall to the ground faster, so people are less likely to become infected.Ĭalifornia also has a longer flu and pneumonia season, a pattern that the coronavirus tends to follow, Mokdad said. The dry air in California may also be a challenge, especially compared with humid Florida. “In many places we have much greater vulnerability than Florida, so it’s comparing apples and oranges,” L.A. California’s rate of overcrowding in homes, a metric linked to coronavirus spread, is also more than double Florida’s. When it comes to California and Florida, it isn’t an even playing field.Ībout 55% of California residents live in counties with a high “social vulnerability” score - a measure of how severely a disease outbreak might affect a region - while only a quarter of Floridians do. Here’s how it turned outĬalifornia and Florida took vastly different approaches to COVID-19, generating debate about which state fared better. “One might’ve expected that the Floridas of the world would’ve done tremendously worse than the Californias of the world, and they did worse, but modestly worse, and there’s something to be learned there.”Ĭalifornia and Florida took vastly different approaches to COVID-19. Robert Wachter, chair of UC San Francisco’s Department of Medicine.
But I do think you do have to come away with some humility,” said Dr.
“If I had to do it again, I’d still do it the way California did it. They are confident that mask wearing and staying home reduce the spread of the coronavirus but acknowledge that California’s strict rules became less effective as exhaustion set in by late 2020. Regardless, the comparison of Florida and California has caught the eye of some public health experts. It “absolutely is worth it to do everything you can to slow the spread of a deadly virus that wreaks havoc on people’s lives and really almost took down L.A. That’s “a lot of people whose lives got wrecked, and a lot of people who aren’t with us anymore,” Los Angeles County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said.
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