Regular readers will remember that earlier in the summer, yours truly regularly pointed to Florida and Texas as examples of places which had abandoned Covid restrictions completely, and were doing just fine. It would be dishonest, then, not to cover the fact that in recent weeks, both states have experienced a mega surge in cases (though not yet, thankfully, a mega surge in deaths).
Here are the charts:
There are a few things to note here: First, the increase in cases is not directly correlated with the abandonment of restrictions. Both states abandoned lockdowns in March, and cases kept falling for months. They only began to rise again in the middle of July, and have only begun to really surge in the last few weeks.
Nevertheless, Florida and Texas, and Mississippi, which also abandoned restrictions, are clearly driving the surge in numbers in the USA, as this map demonstrates. The darker the shade, the more cases there are:
So what’s the reason? Is it purely that restrictions were abandoned? That does not seem to make much sense, since cases kept falling for months after that occurred. There are three points to make, all of which seem more relevant. The first is that both Texas and Florida have seen massive amounts of vaccine hesitation: Only 49% of Florida residents have received two jabs of the vaccine, though 59% have received at least one jab. That’s fully 40% of the population, unvaccinated, against a Delta strain which we know to be very highly contagious. In Texas? It’s lower again: 44% double jabbed, and 53% with one jab. That’s 47% of the population with no vaccine at all. Other states with much higher vaccination rates have not seen a surge on the same scale, though cases are rising in places like New York and California, as well.
The second point is the weather: In Ireland, people huddle indoors in the winter. In Florida and Texas, with mild winters and scorching summers, they huddle indoors during the heat of the summer, with air conditioners circulating potentially infected air through buildings. That’s a Delta paradise.
The third point to make is that thus far, though Florida is now seeing its highest case numbers of the entire pandemic, those cases have not translated into deaths: The case fatality rate is hovering around 0.07%- about what you would expect for the flu. The real problem, though, is that the hospitalisation rate is absolutely surging, which means that people cannot access hospitals, which may raise the death rate again.
Finally, there’s the horrifying possibility: That seasonal covid mega-surges are with us to stay forever, regardless of what we do, and that we are entering a multi-year period of opening and closing the economy to account for spikes like this one. After all, what’s happening in Florida today is basically what NPHET said they expected to happen in Ireland, around about now. Who’s to say it won’t still happen, this winter, regardless of what we do? My own view is that the vaccines are critical here, but a meaningful number of people disagree with that, and do not want to take them. So, the question, really, is whether it is time for Florida and Texas to re-impose some restrictions. Both states have Governors who have refused to allow any kind of coercion of people into taking a vaccine – there are no requirements to be vaccinated to do anything, in either state.
That’s a liberal policy, but when it is combined with rampant anti-vaccine sentiment on the right of US politics, it is almost certainly contributing to the present case numbers. If, as present trends suggest, hospitals reach their capacity in Florida, then re-imposing some form of lockdown to get cases under control looks like a reasonable policy, much as it might annoy readers to say so.