Print
To the editor: Only one thing is worse than making a mistake, and that is failing to acknowledge it. California has simply not chosen the right path in handling COVID-19, while Florida has, and The Times fails to accept that fact. (“California and Florida took vastly different approaches to COVID-19. Here’s how it turned out,” March 9)
By choosing to focus on a few data points, The Times misses the point that Florida’s refusal to crater its economy for the sake of appearances was the better path.
The death rates quoted in the article and expressed in percentages are really quite close: 0.1385% of California’s population has died from COVID-19, versus 0.1538% for Florida. Having lost a friend to COVID-19, I know that each individual death is tragic, but using gross numbers expressed in deaths per million masks the relatively small difference and unfairly plays on our individual emotions.