And if California had the same death rate as Florida, there'd be an additional 40k dead people. These things aren't remotely symmetrical and it's such a disservice to pretend like "both sides are bad".

If you re-read my post above though, I'm not saying they're symmetrical. But to me it's striking that one state put in severe restrictions on business/etc for over a year, and the other state just pretended there was no pandemic, and yet California's did not even halve the case/death rates compared to Florida (per capita).

So the question California dares not ask itself is: were all the restrictions actually necessary? Maybe small businesses could have been allowed to open sooner with a mask + ventilation requirement, for example. Or maybe a single, uniform policy did not make sense for the enormously-varied state. But you can't ask those questions.

If you look at California on a county-by-county basis the restrictions definitely did halve the death rate (and beyond). The counties in California that behaved more like Florida were rewarded with a great deal more death. San Francisco, which had not only tough restrictions but high compliance, had the lowest Covid-19 death rate of any metro in the country.

What do you think pays for welfare, healthcare, food? The Grenadier Guard?

Most people talk about excessive deaths, but nobody talks about a reduction of births.

How many children were never conceived since their parents were out of work, or unsure about the future?

Florida has a much older population so you’d need to adjust for that.

Plus Florida has moved on since 8 months ago. No everything is measured in only covid deaths.

Moved on what?

FL had record breaking deaths 2 months ago.

Moved on from restrictions. Accepted that Covid is never going away and putting life on hold isn't a good trade off.

Hundreds to thousands of new cases in high population centers in California every day: https://ca-covid-r.info/

Dozens of deaths in high population centers in California every day: http://publichealth.lacounty.gov/media/Coronavirus/data/inde...

Stay in your fucking home, even if you're vaccinated.

Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Also: please make your substantive points without flamebait. Your comment here would be fine without the last sentence.