Last update: Monday 6/20/22
The previous note posted to this blog ended with an awkward question: Had Governor DeSantis made one exception to his anti-mandate posture by requiring public and private sector employers to vaccinate their employees, would the death rate for all residents in Florida have been as low as the death rates in California and New York?
As per Table 2C. in an earlier note on this blog, California's death rate was 243 per 100,000 population; New York's was 183, while Florida's was 323. That's the bad news. The good news for Florida in that note was that its death rate for its oldest residents, i.e., 65+, as shown in Table 2D of that blog note was only 1,195 per 100,000, a rate that was much closer to the death rates for California and New York, that were 1,186 and 917, respectively.
So why did Florida do so badly overall, but so well with its oldest residents? Vaccinations, vaccinations, vaccinations. Governor DeSantis kept his pledge to provide maximum opportunity for his state's oldest residents to be vaccinated as soon as possible on a voluntary basis, no mandates.
- "Governor Ron DeSantis: Florida Putting Seniors First and Leading the Nation in Vaccinations for Those 65+", Press Release, Governor Ron DeSantis, 1/23/21
As per Table 3CDC Florida's vaccination rate (67.1%) for residents 5 and older was lower than the vaccination rates in California (72.3%) and New York (77.1%). This was consistent with Florida's higher death rate than California and New York. On the other hand, Florida's vaccination rate for its oldest residents (91.3%) was as high as the vaccination rates for California (90.8%), and New York (92.3%) for their oldest residents ... which accounts for why the death rates for Florida's oldest residents was about as low as the death rates for the oldest residents of California and New York.
First experiment, Governor DeSantis
Governor DeSantis is a highly educated man: Yale undergrad, Harvard Law grad. He definitely is not an anti-science anti-vaxxer. Indeed, his extraordinary efforts to vaccinate as many of his state's oldest residents as soon as possible is testimony to his trust in "the science" that produced highly effective vaccines. In a sense the governor conducted a massive experiment in which he suppressed all mitigations and relied solely on vaccinations to manage the pandemic. But why did he only focus on the most vulnerable?
- To be sure, the oldest residents needed the most protection. When doctors were lamenting that the pandemic had become a pandemic of the unvaccinated, they sometimes forgot to mention that the vast majority of the unvaccinated victims were also the oldest residents. The last column of Table 2B shows that 70 percent of the COVID deaths nationwide were 65+.
- However, the last column of Table 2B also shows that the second most vulnerable age group was 35 to 64, the most productive segment of the nation's workforce. This group accounted for 24 percent of the COVID deaths nationwide. When the nation's death toll from COVID reached one million, it had lost about 240,000 of its best workers. Why didn't the governor also make special efforts to save as many of these lives as possible?
Yes, he would have had to mandate vaccinations for public sector employees and he would have had to bully pulpit his state's private sector employers to vaccinate their employees. But polls have shown that most GOP voters want policies that enhance the economy, even at the expense of controlling the pandemic. Protecting the most productive segment of the workforce would have served both objectives.
2nd experiment, Governor Who???
Governor DeSantis began 2021 with a pledge to vaccinate and a firm intention to abhor all mandates and all mediations other than vaccines. He was a "rebel" way back then, an "outlaw" who defied the CDC's decrees. However, with the rise of Omicron and the biblical progeny of ever more transmissible subvariants that it continues to "begat", a supermajority of the American public is highly unlikely to comply with future sweeping guidance for lock downs, quarantines, remote classes, or wearing masks. The only tools that governors, mayors, and other leaders will have at their disposal will be federally subsidized vaccines, boosters, and treatments. In this emerging context, Governor DeSantis is beginning to look less like a "rebel" and more like a "pioneer".
COVID will keep on killing people, so other governors and residents of other states might find estimates of the implications of a more extensive "Florida strategy" of some interest. Accordingly, the editor of this blog will provide a rough assessment of the impact on Florida's overall death rate had Governor DeSantis mandated vaccines for his state's most productive employees, i.e., workers in the 35 to 64 age group. The editor of this blog will develop this assessment in Part B of this two-part note.
Part A has shown that Florida attained a death rate for its senior residents that was about the same as California's death rate for seniors via the high priority efforts of Governor DeSantis. So Part B (forthcoming) will assume that a similar effort for the 35 to 64 age group in Florida would have also yielded a death rate that was about the same as California's for that group. The editor will then factor the revised projected deaths for this group into a new calculation of the overall death rate for Florida in a revised version of Table 2C. Hopefully, the revised overall death rate will be substantially lower than the real rate.
... Part B, forthcoming by 7/1/22 ...
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