What happened to Florida?

 About a month ago, I had a post inspired by a NY Times story on the Covid epidemic in Florida.  At that time, Florida had the highest hospitalization and death rates of any state, by a large margin.  It occurred to me that I hadn't heard anything about the situation in Florida lately, so I decided to look at contemporary data.  

Here is the relationship between vaccination and hospitalization rates as of late August (the post didn't appear until September 3, but the data were from a few days before that):

 

Here is the relationship as of late September:

 

 

 Florida is still above its predicted value, but it's no longer an extreme outlier.   The highest hospitalization rate is now in West Virginia, which was 14th a month ago, so things have changed a lot over the last month.  

Here is the change in hospitalization rates between August and September by vaccination rates (in August):

Florida had the biggest change (a decline), but all of the other states with large changes were ones with low vaccination rates.  Conversely, most of the states with low vaccination rates had large changes--some increased and some declined.  This makes sense, since Covid is an infectious disease and a lower vaccination rate means more people at high risk of catching it.  Neither the August or September rates (or the change) had any discernible relationship to the masking and other restrictions in place in late August.  

Finally, I regressed changes in vaccination rates* on hospitalization rates in late August and several political variables:  Biden's share of the vote, a dummy variable for states with a Democratic governor, and a set of dummy variables for various levels of restrictions.  Although the restrictions mostly involved masks and social distancing rather than incentives to get vaccinated, my idea was that people might take them as a signal of how big a problem Covid was.  Higher hospitalization rates were associated with more vaccinations during the next few weeks, but there was no evidence that any of the political variables made a difference.  In a sense, it's encouraging that people are responding to actual conditions despite the effect of politics in getting us to where we are today.** 

Here is the relationship between hospitalization rates in late August and new vaccinations over the next few weeks. 

Two states stand out--Arizona had a high rate of new vaccinations, and West Virginia was very low, but even leaving them aside there was a good deal of variation. Given the clear importance of vaccination rates and the lack of evidence that anything else matters now, I think there should be more attention to understanding differences in the pace of new vaccinations.

*I used vaccination rates as of September 13, since it takes a couple of weeks for vaccinations to have full effect.

**I tried an interaction between Biden vote and hospitalization rates.  The estimate was large enough to be of interest, suggesting that the effect of hospitalization rates was about 50% larger in a state which had 60% for Biden than a state which had 40% for Biden, but the t-ratio was only 1.1.  That is, it's not to say much of anything about the possibility of an interaction given these data.