All of it much more manageable and probably many fewer businesses would have had to have been closed, jobs lost, people dying if we just adopted some straightforward measures at the beginning. Super depressing.
That's not a fair comparison!
Florida's age demographic skews elderly because it's an extremely popular retirement destination for folks living along the eastern seaboard.
This census website is a little out of date [1], but it has good proportional data:
* California 62 years and over = 4,253,854 (12.6% total population)
* California 65 years and over = 3,595,658 (10.6%)
* Florida 62 years and over = 3,245,806 (20.3% total population)
* Florida 65 years and over = 2,807,597 (17.6%)
Florida is a retirement home. The reason it has double the deaths is because it has double the old people. That counts for a lot when age is the largest risk factor.
[1] https://www.infoplease.com/us/census/california/demographic-...
California is a geographically large state, but the bulk of the population lives in dense coastal areas. Given that, you'd expect California to have a very high death rate from Covid. But it's actually ranked 38th on a per capita basis (where higher is better), right behind West Virginia.
California has about half the deaths per capita as Florida does, another warm climate, fairly dense large state. It has a quarter of the deaths per capita as New Jersey, the densest state.
San Francisco has one of the lowest rates of any city in the country, despite being the nation's second most dense city.