How much other causation have you looked into? For example population density?
Miami is a small city of 500,000 people.
The Miami metropolitan area population is 6,000,000.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_statistic...
...with a density of 1004 people / sq. mi., compared to the NY metro area with a density of 5313 people / sq. mi..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_metropolitan_area
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area#com...
Yes, NY is clearly is densely populated. I guess I would look for the differences with California.
LA has more people (13.2 million) but appears to be less densely populated with 550 people per sq mile.
I didn’t follow California but I know Florida was offered as a place that not locking down worked.
I can look into it a little more. Florida has a lot of cases, and most came after the first wave. The same with Texas.
Remember that Florida has a significantly older population than California too. 2.1% of the population >85 years old vs 1.3%; 17.6% over 65 years old vs 10.6%. COVID deaths are very concentrated in the elderly. The CDC estimates that the 85+ age group has a 8700x higher chance an infection leading to death, and a 95x higher chance of infection leading to hospitalization, than the 5-17 age group. The article appears to be using non-age-adjusted excess deaths. So California and Florida being equal is a strong sign that California did significantly worse.
https://www.infoplease.com/us/census/florida/demographic-sta...
https://www.infoplease.com/us/census/california/demographic-...
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investi...