>>>I think you know my views on this - though in fairness, I would want to wait a minimum of four weeks before even beginning to look at any trends.
>>>
>>>I still fall in the "for now, everyone should wear masks, keep restrictions at a certain percent" camp. For now. The governor of Texas made a call, based on faith that everyone will still act responsibly. Give it another few weeks before we can even begin to say if that was the right call.
>>
>>https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2020.306130
>>https://www.yahoo.com/news/florida-covid-numbers-face-new-scrutiny-090058319.html
>
>I have to question the accuracy of an article that "Florida already has the fourth-highest total number of deaths in the country from COVID-19, but it is also the country’s second most populous state" In my feeble brain I seem to remember something about California and Texas.


"Buried in the story were several epidemiologists and statisticians who said that compared to other states, Florida’s excess death numbers were nothing new and are not an outlier amidst a deadly pandemic. Dan Weinberger, an associate professor at the Yale School of Public Health, told Yahoo that Florida’s excess death count was average. Jason Salemi, an epidemiologist at the University of South Florida who was also quoted, described Florida’s excess deaths as “kind of middle-of-the-pack,” and told Yahoo that its framing of the excess mortalities — treating them all as COVID deaths that had slipped through official counts — was incorrect."

Lauren Rossen, who researches excess deaths for the Centers for Disease Control, told Yahoo that “Florida doesn’t stand out to me. I agree with the other researchers quoted in the article, Dr. Weinberger and Dr. Salemi,” Rossen told National Review. “We all indicated that the data in Florida are generally consistent with what we see for the US generally, in terms of the gap between COVID-19 deaths and total excess deaths. Florida doesn’t stand out as having an especially large or small difference between COVID-19 and total excess deaths relative to other states or the US overall.”

Weinberger, who has his own study of “the gap between the reported COVID-19 deaths and the total increase in deaths compared to expected number of deaths,” echoed the assessment. “We think that many of those ‘uncounted’ excess deaths were due to COVID — the timing and intensity of the peak in excess deaths closely matches that of the COVID-19 wave,” he told National Review. “But other things, like people avoiding healthcare early in the pandemic, delaying treatments, and other indirect effects of the pandemic can influence this gap as well. If you look at the size of this gap relative to other states, it is really not remarkable — some states have a smaller gap, other have a larger gap.”


https://www.nationalreview.com/news/yahoo-story-on-florida-covid-study-misrepresented-key-finding-studys-author-says/

We'll have to "circle back"