Lot of debate over "this state did better than that state" when the reality is...almost everyone did bad.

Lets start with overall national rate, and then hospitalization rate for the 4 biggest states: California, Texas, New York, and Florida:

What you see is that NY got crushed early...and only recently has been seeing more cases.

Texas and Florida did ok early, got hit in the summer, and trending up now.

California is sort of in the middle, but following the TX/FL trend, slightly doing better for the most part.

What is kind of interesting is where they all are now...everyone looks pretty similar. Texas is slightly worse, then CA, NY, and FL.

NY is the outlier, since they were disease free for so long...but also had a ridiculously high peak early.

Now here is the population adjusted numbers.

New York now has as many cases as the Spring (with, albeit, far more tests). But they are very early in this wave...several weeks behind the others in fact. Their worst is still yet to come.

Florida had a wave in the summer, but in this wave, has the same number of new cases and hospitalizations as NY...even though they are probably ahead of NY by several weeks. In short...FL 'probably' is doing better than NY, but we need more data.

Texas did about the same as Florida in the summer, but is doing worse now. Hospitalizations are 50% higher than Florida's. They, too, are ahead of Florida, so this might narrow with more data.

California has been strange all along. They actually were infected early in NorCal, but contained it. Then LA got hit. Now, both are getting hit again. Part of this is because they are just such a huge state. But the current wave looks very bad for them.

So which state is doing 'better'?

Honestly I think its a stupid question. I think they are all doing badly in many ways.

But the variables, such as weather, geography, and pure dumb luck make comparing these in these snapshots as very difficult.

I will say...Florida has, on average, done better than many in the media want to admit.

And New York has done worse.

California and Texas look a lot different, but might be doing about the same. TX has more deaths per capita right now, but this wave may, sadly, even that up.

The reality is that politics is making people look through rose colored glasses.

There are almost no success stories here. There are marginal, narrow victories that last for a short period of time, but that is it.

Like, this. Ashish is right. Baker did well early on, even compared to his North Eastern Brethren.

His policies right now make no sense, and it shows. https://twitter.com/ashishkjha/status/1335433924202418176?s=20

I mean...name me a single news network (liberal, conservative or otherwise) that has pointed out that Massachusetts is doing worse than almost everyone.

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Along the same lines. https://twitter.com/thehowie/status/1335766204229836800?s=20

Simply put: we are going to get another surge in a few weeks from Thanksgiving.

And then a month after that, another one from Christmas/New Years.

I see nothing but bad news. Just stay vigilant, and use common sense.