Florida's Governor Ron DeSantis: COVID Rebel or Pioneer??? (Part B)

Last update: Sunday 7/3/22 

This blog note is the second of a two part analysis of the controversial pandemic management strategy employed by Florida's governor Ron DeSantis, a well educated man with  White House ambitions. The governor relied on one tool to manage the pandemic in his state: extensive, but voluntary vaccination of his state's senior residents, age 65 and above. He vehemently rejected all mandates, e.g., masks, moving classes online, as well as mandates for vaccinations. 

Introduction/Executive Summary

So how did he do? A previous note on this blog, "Elections 2024 ... Table CDC", found that Florida vaccinated about the same percentage of its senior residents as did California, one of the nation's bluest states, states that made extensive efforts to conform to all of the CDC's mediation guidelines. Moreover, the COVID death rate per 100,000 of Florida's senior residents was about the same as California's death rate for this age group, "Elections 2024 ... Table2D". However, Florida's overall death rate, i.e., the number of COVID deaths per 100,00 among all of the state's age groups was substantially higher than California's overall death rate, again "Elections 2024 ... Table2D".

This overall shortfall led the editor to hypothesize that had Florida's governor made the same kind of intensive efforts to vaccinate its middle aged residents, age 40 to 64, as did California, including mandates for public sector employees, then Florida's overall death rate might have been about the same as California's. 

Tables 4 and 5 presented in this note will show that the editor was wrong ... or more correctly, the number of lives saved in Florida would not have been sufficient to offset the loss of the substantial benefits of the governor's controversial policies, benefits that included minimal disruption of business, minimal disruption of employment, and minimal disruption of the education and social/psychological development of the state's millions of young children and teenagers.

Way back in the Spring of 2020, most Americans were willing to have their lives disrupted by lockdowns, quarantines, masks, remote learning and social distancing, but not today. Going forward, no more mandates. Going forward, the only mediations that will be tolerated by most Americans will be voluntary vaccinations, boosters, and anti-viral treatments for those who become severely ill from infections or those who are at risk of becoming severely ill. 

These considerations should cause the nation's mainstream media to reposition Governor DeSantis from his prior status as an irresponsible COVID rebel to that of a pioneer with regards to living with the new normal, but they probably won't because the governor's positions on a wide range of other issues are so far-fetched. Nevertheless, America's governors, county executives, and mayors should take notice of his apparent success on this one. 

Editor's warning to our readers -- This is a long read. If you are already aware of credible data from other sources that supports the statements in the "Introduction", you probably won't learn much by reading the rest of the note. ... :-)

 

A. Columns in the tables

• Sources: COVID deaths and populations for California and Florida by age groups were obtained by downloading the CDC file named "Provisional COVID-19 Deaths by Sex and Age" that was updated on 6/29/22. This file contained death totals for the entire pandemic, about 2.5 years
  
  Full vaccinations by age groups for the two states and the United States were obtained by downloading the CDC file named "COVID-19 Vaccination Age and Sex Trends in the United States, National and Jurisdictional" that was updated on 7/1/22. This file contained vaccination data from the beginning of 2021.
  
  The editor crafted a few "Tidyverse" R scripts to wrangle the required data from each file and merge them into the note's two tables. The tables are numbered "4" and "5" because related tables "1", "2", and "3" appeared in previous notes on this blog.
  
  
• Age groups (column 1)
  Five age groups are specified: All Ages, 0 to 17 (children & teenagers), 18 to 39 (young adults), 40 to 64 (middle aged adults), and 65 and over (seniors).  
  
  
• caDeaths/flDeaths (column 2) -- The number of COVID deaths in each age group
  
  
• caDeaths %/caDeaths % (column 3) -- Percentage of COVID deaths inflicted on each age group; adds up to 100% for "All Ages"
  
  
• caPoP/flPop (column 4) -- Population within each age group
  
  
• caPop %/flPop % (column 5) -- Percentage of population in each age group; adds up to 100% for "All Ages"
  
  
• caFullVax/flFullVax (column 6) -- Number of fully vaccinated residents in each age group
  
  
• caDeathsPer100k/flDeathsPer100k (column 7) -- Number of COVID deaths per 100,000 population in each age group
  
  
• caFullVax %/flFullVax % (column 8) -- Percent of population in each age group that is fully vaccinated
  
  
• usDeaths (column 9, only in Table 4) -- US population in each age group
  
  
• usDeaths % (column 10, only in Table 4) -- Percent of US population in each age group
  

B. Tables 4 and 5

Table 4. California Vax and Death Rates per 100K by Age Groups.

AgeGroup	caDeaths	caDeaths %	caPop	caPop %	caFullVax	caDeathsPer100k	caFullVax %	usDeaths	usDeaths %
All Ages	96,126	100	39,512,223	100	28,773,645	243	72.8	1,006,212	100
0-17 years	92	0.1	8,894,641	22.5	3,543,946	1	39.8	1,063	0.1
18-39 years	2,917	3	12,511,561	31.7	9,390,092	23	75.1	24,539	2.4
40-64 years	25,542	26.6	12,267,906	31.1	10,491,347	208	85.5	230,953	23
65+ years	67,575	70.3	5,838,115	14.8	5,348,260	1,157	91.6	749,657	74.5

Table 5. Florida Vax and Death Rates per 100K by Age Groups.

AgeGroup	flDeaths	flDeaths %	flPop	flPop %	flFullVax	flDeathsPer100k	flFullVax %
All Ages	70,695	100	21,477,737	100	14,522,157	329	67.6
0-17 years	78	0.1	4,229,929	19.6	1,150,886	2	27.2
18-39 years	1,874	2.7	5,878,931	27.4	3,718,742	32	63.3
40-64 years	16,460	23.3	6,871,540	32	5,516,131	240	80.3
65+ years	52,283	74	4,497,337	21	4,136,398	1,163	92

 

C. Comments about the tables

• Older people were far more likely to be killed by the coronavirus than younger people. This strong pattern is displayed by the data in columns 2, 3, and 5 in both tables. That it also holds true for the United States as a whole can be seen from the data in columns 9 and 10 in Table 4. To be specific, the youngest age group suffered the smallest number of deaths (columns 2 and 9), the smallest percentage of deaths (columns 3 and 10), and the smallest number of deaths per 100,000 (column 5)
  
  
• Nevertheless, older people were more likely to be fully vaccinated than younger people. Columns 6 and 8 in both tables show that the smallest number of people and the smallest percentage of fully vaccinated members belong to the youngest age group, while the largest number and percentage belong to the oldest age group. 
  
  
• The share of a state's COVID deaths inflicted on its seniors was far larger than their share of the state's population. 70.3 percent of California's COVID deceased were seniors (Table4, column 3, last row); whereas seniors only constituted 14.8 percent of California's population (Table 4, column 5, last row). Florida's seniors incurred 74 percent of the state's COVID deaths (Table 5, column 3, last row); whereas seniors only made up 21 percent of Florida's population (Table 5, column 5, last row). COVID is not an "equal opportunity" killer.
  
  
• California's death rate per 100,000 seniors was about the same as Florida's. California's was 1,157 (Table 4, column 7, last row); Florida's was 1,163 per 100k seniors (Table 4, column 7, last row).
  
  
• The equivalence of their death rates for seniors was consistent with their having fully vaccinated more or less the same percentage of seniors: California 91.6% (Table 4, column 7, last row) and Florida 92 % (Table 5, column 7,  last row).
  
  
• Nevertheless,  California had a much smaller overall death rate than Florida, 243 per 100K  (Table 4, column 7, top row) vs 329 per 100k (Table 5, column 7, top row). This overall disparity led this blog's editor to examine the death rates for each state's second most vulnerable age group, its middle aged 40 to 64 year olds. Note that the editor formulated this conjecture before he calculated the middle aged death rates. This middle age rate was not included in any of the files that were returned when the editor searched the CDC's files. That's why he downloaded the files that would enable him to make this calculation himself.
  
  
• California's middle aged residents had a smaller death rate than Florida's, but not substantially smaller. California's was 208 (Table 4, column 7, row 4) vs. Florida[s 240 (Table 5, column 7, row 4). 
  
  Therefore if Florida had the same death rate as California for its middle age residents, the number of lives saved could be calculated using the difference in death rates - 240 - 208 = 32
  
  Lives saved = (Diff  * Florida's middle age population) / 100,000 (Table 5, col 7, row 4)
  
  Lives saved = (32 *  5,516,131) /100,000  = 1,765 for the entire 2.5 years of the pandemic, which imply no more than 1,765 / 2.5 = 706 lives saved per year. However, in 2019, the most recent non-pandemic year, 2,703 residents of Florida died from pneumonia and/or the flu, according to the Website of the Florida Department of Health
  
  
• Therefore, in the context of Florida's much larger recent deaths from flu and pneumonia, 706 lives saved from COVID per year would not be enough to justify substantial disruptions of business and employment -- which did not occur because of the no mandate COVID policies of Governor DeSantis.

D. Conclusions

• First and foremost, the editor of this blog made a much bigger mistake than anticipating that a substantial number of lives might have been saved in Florida had Governor DeSantis made strenuous efforts to vaccinate his state's middle aged residents.
  
  The editor's greater error was not damning both California and Florida (and just about every other state) for not vaccinating much higher percentages of their senior residents. If the goal was to save the most lives, surely the highest priority for vaccinations (and boosters) should have been given to oldest U.S. residents and to other residents who were afflicted with well-documented vulnerabilities to COVID, like diabetes, morbid obesity, and compromised immune systems.
  
  
• For months the CDC and other authorities have been lamenting that well over 95 percent of those who died from COVID were unvaccinated. "This has become a pandemic of the unvaccinated." What the experts often failed to note in their lamentations was that a super majority of the unvaccinated deceased had to be 65 and older because more than 70 percent of all COVID's deceased were 65 and older throughout the U.S. 
  
  As per the last row of column 8 in Tables 4 and 5, California and Florida both vaccinated about 92 percent of their senior residents. That sounds great until one notices that the other 8 percent, i.e., the unvaccinated seniors, represent large pools of potential victims in these highly populous states:
  
  -- 8 percent of California's near 6 million seniors (noted in the last row of the third column of Table 4) yields 480,000 unvaccinated seniors;
  
  -- Florida's 8 percent of its 4.5 million seniors yields 360,000 unvaccinated seniors (last row, 3rd column of Table 5). 
  
  Vaccinating half of these unvaccinated seniors would have yielded substantial reductions to the 67,575 and 52,283 deaths among the senior residents of California and Florida, respectively (last row, second  column in both tables).
  
  
• The same reasoning implies that vaccination efforts should have also focused on other COVID-vulnerable groups, e.g., diabetics, morbidly obese, and immunocompromised, with extra focus on vaccinating the oldest members of those other groups. High overall vaccination rates are misleading, if not meaningless, because the COVID virus in all of its variants does not kill everyone; it focuses on seniors and on the members of other vulnerable groups.
  
  
• As can be seen from the death rates per 100,000 in the second row of column 7 in both tables, COVID deaths among youngsters 0 to 17 is a rare event. Therefore the editor reaffirms some of the praise he rendered to Governor DeSantis for the governor's refusal to disrupt the education and social development of the youngest, least vulnerable residents of his state, i.e., his refusal to replace their in-person classes with disastrously ineffective remote Zoom courses.
  
  The negative consequences of these disruptions would impose the largest and longest lasting handicaps on the subsequent education and career prospects of youngsters in the lowest income groups among Black, Hispanic, and Native Americans.
  

Full disclosure requires that the editor of this blog acknowledge that he is a mad-as-hell, 80 year old, doubly boosted, Black resident of another blue state that also gives itself too many pats on the back for doing such a "great job" in vaccinating its oldest residents.

____________________________________

Links to related notes on this blog:  

• "Elections 2024 ... Risk averse Democrats vs. risk tolerant Republicans ... Part 2 (Age groups and vaccinations)" ... Last update: 6/8/22
  
  
• "What if Governor DeSantis had imposed vaccine mandates ??? (Part A, 1st experiment, Governor DeSantis)", Last update: 6/20/22
  
  
• "How well have our vaccines protected the oldest members of our society against COVID?", Last update: 6/11/22