"Don't worry about Florida's Covid-19 surge, because it's not killing many people," people say. Data scientist @mathbabedotorg is not buying it.

Instead, she predicts that by early August, deaths in Florida will be almost as bad as New York at its worst https://trib.al/iVn9Aqa 

Florida and New York have similar populations:

: 21.5 million
: 19.5 million

That makes it possible to compare the two states using raw numbers rather than rates http://trib.al/iVn9Aqa 

New York’s worst daily case count was 11,434 on April 15, and its worst seven-day average was 9,909 on April 10.

Florida had 15,300 new cases on July 12, and a 7-day average of 9,957. In other words, by this measure, Florida is as bad as New York ever was http://trib.al/iVn9Aqa 

But testing in the U.S. is inadequate.

The percent of tests that come back positive offers a sense of how many cases we’re missing: The higher it is, the more we’re probably missing, because people with mild or no symptoms aren’t getting tested http://trib.al/iVn9Aqa 

Florida’s positive test rate was 18.6% as of July 12, which is pretty high but still short of New York’s 44% in the darkest days of the outbreak http://trib.al/iVn9Aqa 

The difference in positive test rates suggests that New York’s maximum daily case count was more like 24,000 in Florida terms (meaning that if New York had been testing as much as Florida is now, it would have found about 24,000 cases) http://trib.al/iVn9Aqa 

What will this mean for deaths?

That depends on how long fatal cases take to die. New York didn’t start counting cases until well after the epidemic had started, so recorded cases and deaths rose almost simultaneously http://trib.al/iVn9Aqa 

Florida’s been counting cases for longer.

The time lag appears to be nearly a full month, in part because younger people – the ones who tend to go out and socialize in bars and so on –– have been getting infected first http://trib.al/iVn9Aqa 

Data scientist @mathbabedotorg forecasts that by Tuesday, August 4, Florida’s seven-day average of daily deaths will reach 600 http://trib.al/iVn9Aqa 

Every week with a high case count –– an average of about 10,000, assuming the positive case rate stays at about 18% –– will be followed about four weeks later by another 600-plus-death-per-day week http://trib.al/iVn9Aqa