California may look worse than Florida in terms of cases. But how much testing you do affects your case counts. If you don't test that many people, your case counts look artificially low.

This is how FL and CA compare in cumulative death counts, a much more reliable metric https://twitter.com/NahasNewman/status/1351595226113126404

We all remember when someone asked to "slow down the testing, please."

As he said, "When you test, you create cases.”

California has tallied 90 COVID deaths for every 100,000 residents compared with 119 out of 100,000 in Florida. In other words, if California had the same death rate as Florida, California would have a cumulative death toll of more than 47,000, instead of its 35,000.

Our latest story puts California's surge in perspective and explain how it got so bad here in December: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-01-22/how-winter-california-covid-19-surge-got-so-bad

California is testing about .85% of its population daily for COVID, compared to Florida which is testing .57% of its population. Those numbers sound small, but CA's testing rate is 50% higher than Florida's. That makes it really difficult to fairly compare between the two states.

Florida has an older population, one of the oldest in the nation, but cases/deaths from COVID aren't unusually concentrated among older folks in Florida compared to other states, so that wouldn't fully account for the state's high death rates

California is a relatively young state, but our numbers don't differ wildly from Florida's. In CA, 11% of COVID cases have been among people over 65, compared to 14% in Florida. Seventy-five percent of our deaths have been people over 65, compared to 81% in Florida.

The experts I spoke to said that what they think is going on is that, yes, there are a lot of older people in Florida, but older people who are really vulnerable to COVID tend to be scared of it and hunker down at home, even if the local laws don't mandate that

So the ages of people falling sick in Florida tend to be relatively similar to what's happening in other states, so there isn't an obvious higher mortality rate in Florida from COVID because the population is so old

If you're still unconvinced, fine! California has lots of vulnerabilities Florida doesn't and every expert I spoke to was annoyed we were even trying to compare the two states, because they're so different

CA will always be more at risk for a giant COVID outbreak because of how many of its cities are major travel hubs, overcrowded and poor. That's why we wrote the story I linked above -- to explain those innate vulnerabilities that often get forgotten when people talking about CA