[matthewdgreen]

Florida is currently facing a $2-$3 billion tax shortfall (numbers vary depending on the time of projection [0]) and California is facing a budget surplus [1]. There are details around this like one-off capital gains and tax rates and budget cuts, but the overall story is that FL had a slightly higher death rate than CA in exchange for an overall economy that isn't doing so well. Some of this is due to the fact that FL's economy is tourism-driven and my personal response to that is: as a tourist I was very tempted to (safely) visit FL this winter, but the whole "our state doesn't believe in basic COVID restrictions" thing made that much too scary.

[0] https://www.wftv.com/news/local/facing-3-billion-shortfall-l...

[1] https://apnews.com/article/gavin-newsom-california-coronavir...

[rajin444]

Will you adjust your priors after seeing death rates between California and Florida are roughly the same?

[matthewdgreen]

They're not the same, Florida is higher. But overall Florida seems to be an outlier among the "low restriction" states and California seems to be an outlier among the "high restriction" states. A better approach would be to average the groups of states that took different approaches, and maybe also try to normalize by other confounders like population density. This is probably a better approach because there might be other pandemics in the future that are way deadlier, and we should actually know what works and what doesn't.