PLAGUE JOURNAL September 2021: Blaming Politicians for the Weather
A month ago, the media blamed Florida's Governor DeSantis for a spike in cases. Where are we now?
[Note: All Plague Journal entries were written as events unfolded. I have edited the drafts for clarity, but the tone and content are original, reflecting what we could see at the time.]
August Blame
Our media are professionally cruel, a band of mercenary jackals. In an earlier post, I wrote about the anger and division stoked by independent writers including Heather Cox Richardson, whose “Letters from an American” delivers a daily synopsis of stories from popular media. On August 27th, Richardson had written a few off-hand comments about Florida’s Governor DeSantis, standard stuff about him killing people. When I saw her readers accept the story without question, I posted a response.
DeSantis, by banning mask- and vaccine mandates, had become a popular target. The press are so disturbed by popular Republican governors (who could become popular presidential candidates) that they put a lot of energy into tearing them down wherever they find them. (Remember when the Atlantic told us about Georgia’s “experiment in human sacrifice”?)
Richardson’s comments about DeSantis were brief. Like all of her comments, they seem designed to arouse anger among her readers. On that front, they were successful. Her readers aren’t interested in information, as they could get the same messages from a hundred other easily accessible sources. They are there for the ritual anger. To date, there have been 561 comments to the post, about DeSantis and other topics of the day. Typical comments about DeSantis include, “I did not realize until now that DeSantis and his ilk are actually trying to increase the number of dead in their state(s) in order to blame Biden . . . .” And, “DeSantis is now sacrificing the children with his anti-mask stance.” (More children die from flu or drowning than from COVID.)
Richardson’s DeSantis comments were brief. In full, they read:
In Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis has forbidden mask or vaccine mandates, 21,000 people a day are being diagnosed with coronavirus—more than twice the rate of the rest of the country—and almost 230 a day are dying, a rate triple that of the rest of the country. Right now, Florida alone accounts for one fifth of national deaths from Covid.
Ten major hospitals in Florida are out of space in their morgues and have rented coolers for their dead; those, too, are almost full. Intensive care units in the state are 94% occupied. Sixty-eight hospitals warned yesterday that they had fewer than 48 hours left of the oxygen their Covid patients need, a reflection of the fact that 17,000 people are currently hospitalized in the state.
Appearing on the Fox News Channel last night, DeSantis blamed Biden for the crisis. “He said he was going to end Covid,” DeSantis said. “He hasn’t done that.”
I knew that Florida was nowhere near the top of the ranks for severe illness and death from COVID and that she was engaging in standard media cherry-picking and bad math. I posted a response, writing that the summer spike in Florida was to be expected and that it had nothing to do with DeSantis’s policies. (Which is not to say that the spike was inevitable: if we had better reporting about how the virus spreads, including the risks from summer air-conditioning, we could mitigate some of the damage.) Not only could we predict the spike, but we could predict its end also. I wrote my response a month ago. Now we can see what has happened since Richardson’s inflammatory comments and her readers’ outrage from August 26th.
Here is my response at the time (August 27th), which I have condensed to focus on Florida’s seasonality (otherwise, it is unedited):
The comments about Florida’s coronavirus fatality rates are misleading. The first sentence reveals the political bias: “In Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis has forbidden mask or vaccine mandates, 21,000 people a day are being diagnosed with coronavirus—more than twice the rate of the rest of the country . . . .” The statement implies cause and effect although Ron DeSantis’s views on masks and vaccines have little to do with last week’s coronavirus outcomes.
Invoking vaccinations presses popular rage buttons but is a red herring. Florida’s population is 52% fully vaccinated, which matches the overall U.S. number (NYT 8/27/2021). After the scary opening sentence, we get this hair-raiser: “Right now, Florida alone accounts for one fifth of national deaths from Covid.” This is the number we will tell our friends over cocktails. Florida’s looking bad. Can you believe DeSantis is killing all these people?
The number is misleading for a number of reasons. First, it uses total counts rather than per capita rates. Florida is our third most populous state. The four states with the highest cumulative fatalities are California, Texas, New York, and Florida—our four most populous states. We could rank states by shoulder pain or cockeyedness and get the same ranking. All through 2020, tiny San Marino and Belgium had the world’s highest fatality rates, yet the headlines disproportionately focused on the U.S., Russia, Brazil, and the Soviet Union—all of which are in the world’s top ten for population, and all of which had political leaders the press didn’t like. Our press are not very good with numbers.
Blaming DeSantis for Florida’s outcomes last week also misleads because it ignores the preceding year and a half. To buy the argument, we would have to believe that DeSantis loves masks from October to May and then turns against them each year beginning in June. (And keep in mind that he hasn’t banned masks or vaccines but has simply resisted the urge to require them.) His views have been consistent throughout, as have the views of the governors of New York and other mid-Atlantic states, which have many of our country’s highest cumulative rates. The Sunbelt states and the mid-Atlantic states are simply on different cycles from one another.
Cumulatively, the states with the worst fatality rates are, in order: New Jersey, New York, Mississippi, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Arizona, Alabama, Connecticut, and South Dakota (Worldometers, 8/27/2021). Half are red; half are blue. (The blue states are a bit worse, ranking one and two and four of the top six). Attitudes towards masks, lockdowns, and vaccines run the gamut in these states. Remove South Dakota, and what do we see? The blue states all border each other in a tiny area along the mid-Atlantic coast that sits in cool (not too cold) gray weather in the winter. The red states all border each other in the deep south, balmy in the winter, sweltering hot in the summer, with near-universal air-conditioning.
Florida, although in the same geographical neighborhood as these red states, ranks just 20th for cumulative per capita fatalities. Texas, the other state most vilified in our headlines, ranks 25th. The press don’t understand numbers, but they sure hate states with large populations and high-profile Republican governors. We might expect cumulative rates in Florida to be much higher, as it has the sixth-oldest population in the country. People 65 and older account for 79% of all coronavirus deaths (CDC). But Florida took a humane approach toward its most vulnerable population, keeping infected people out of nursing homes while New York and many other states mandated their admittance.
For two summers, we have watched the headlines express outrage at Arizona, Texas, Florida, Georgia, and other Sunbelt states beginning in late June or July when intense heat pushes people indoors, into sealed, dry, air-conditioned homes. Florida is “safe” in May and June and again in October and November. They are less safe in August. Florida is our hottest state, so it makes sense that it would have our nation’s highest fatality rates in late August.
Our Southern states are not hot all year. Winter weather in the Florida Panhandle is a lot like winter weather in New York and New Jersey. Tallahassee had eleven days in December 2020 with lows in the 30s, another fourteen in January. Florida experiences tropical heat in Miami in July, European weather in the Panhandle in January: the worst of both worlds for the coronavirus. Likewise, Georgia has it’s cool, gray southwest (just above the Panhandle); Louisiana is cool and temperate in and around New Orleans; Arizona has high-elevation cool weather in its northeast; Texas has high-elevation hill country. All of these places see winter spikes, though less severe than along the stretch of coastline near New York City in the winter.
Virtually the entire U.S. sees its lowest fatality rates in June, when days are longest and the weather is no longer cold, not yet hot, roughly the time when we no longer have to run the heater and haven’t yet turned on the air-conditioner. (I turned mine on May 19th. Fatalities lag by about a month.) That’s when we get scare headlines about India and variants and a man who resisted the vaccine and killed his entire family.
The mask-and-lockdown mantra has been popular since the beginning, but masks and lockdowns correlate not at all with coronavirus outcomes. They do correlate with economic outcomes: the huge lockdown states of California and New York tie for having the second-highest unemployment rate in the country at 7.6%. The eleven states with the lowest unemployment all have Republican governors. Five of them are in the bottom ten for per capita coronavirus fatality rates. Maybe the misleading, politicized headlines should be set aside in favor of information that could help people. The constant finger-pointing about things that don’t matter takes attention away from things that could, such as opening windows, turning on a fan, dropping a few pounds, spending time in the sun.
For what it’s worth, the normally talkative readers were silent about my comment. I was not welcome at their party.
September Update: One Month Later
What do we see now (September 25th), a month after Richardson’s accusations? We see the same thing we see virtually every time the media write a story about terrible people causing COVID havoc with their disobedience: we see Florida cases in steep decline. As we saw last year in the stories blaming failures of masking for seasonal spikes, Florida’s cases had already peaked by the time Richardson posted her remarks. The media point their fingers at the top of the curve, then remain silent when cases plummet. There will be no headlines praising DeSantis’s strong leadership for the current steep decline. Richardson and the rest of the press might as well blame DeSantis for killing the sun during an eclipse.
According to the New York Times, Florida averaged 21,673 new cases per day in the week leading up to 8/25 (consistent with Richardson’s claim of 21,000). As of September 21st (the most recent data from the NYT), the seven-day average was 9,112 and falling. I had written on August 27th that Florida is at risk in July and August because we know what happens in hot, overcast places where 98% of the homes have air-conditioning. (In addition to the heat that sends people indoors, Miami is mostly cloudy or overcast 68% of the time in July and August, with precipitation on 60% of the days, depriving the population of much-needed vitamin D.)
I wrote that Florida is “safe” in October and November because we know what happens when the extreme heat subsides and the infection curve has crested. (What goes up, comes down.) With a better understanding of what causes spreading, we could reduce the severity of these spikes, but the headlines pretend it’s all about masks and lockdowns (now vaccines).
A Weather Anomaly
Although we could see the general patterns, I was curious about something in the data: cases in 2021 peaked around August 18th, while cases in 2020 cases peaked a month earlier, around July 18th. If air-conditioning, driven by hot weather, caused the spikes, why was the 2020 spike a month earlier?
Part of the answer is that these are general patterns only. There will always be accidents and anomalies: a breakout in a nursing home, anomalous testing patterns in prisons or other large institutions, and so on. But a glance at the weather provides a perfectly logical explanation. The first half of July 2020 was unusually hot, and the first half of July 2021 was unusually cool. Floridians sealed themselves indoors at least three weeks earlier in the summer of 2020 than they did in 2021. By late July and throughout August of 2021, temperatures throughout the state had returned to normal—at or above historic averages—and COVID cases spiked.