The WSJ had an interesting article with theories on why Florida had a lower rate of infection than predicted. https://www.wsj.com/articles/smart-or-lucky-how-florida-dodged-the-worst-of-coronavirus-11588531865?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=2
The article lists a few reasons:
Mr. DeSantis restricted visitation to nursing homes but he left early lockdown decisions to local authorities. Mayors in some hard-hit large communities shut down faster and more aggressively than the state, gaining valuable time.
Walt Disney World closed two weeks before the statewide order. Spring breakers, who packed Florida beaches and bars until mid-March, went back home. Some scientists point to Florida’s low population density, while others to its subtropical climate to explain fewer infections.
A key factor, many say, is a change in the behavior of Floridians. Though the governor didn’t impose a statewide stay-at-home order until April 3, people began hunkering down en masse in mid-March, according to firms that analyze anonymous cellphone data.
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[As of last Saturday] Florida had 6 deaths per 100,000 people as of Saturday, compared with 42 in Louisiana, 56 in Massachusetts and 97 in New York, according to states’ data.
California had 5 deaths per 100,000 people and Texas had 3.
The seven-day average of new cases in Florida—concentrated mostly in the populous South Florida counties of Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach—generally has been declining in the past few weeks and the seven-day average of new deaths has plateaued.
As of Friday, there were 1,384 residents of long-term care facilities in the state with Covid-19, or 0.9% of the total resident population. There were 388 deaths of long-term care residents.
People aged 65 and over make up 20.5% of Florida’s population, the second-highest proportion of any state in the U.S., after Maine.
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Mr. DeSantis resisted recommendations by public-health experts to issue a statewide stay-at-home order or close the beaches, which were starting to fill with spring-break revelers. Instead, he chose to take a targeted approach aimed at the hardest-hit counties and to defer to local officials on implementing restrictions. A large state like Florida, where many counties were far less affected by the outbreak and would suffer economic pain from a lockdown, doesn’t lend itself to a uniform strategy, he said in news conferences in March.
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[The article then describes how individual cities and counties made decisions to close earlier or later based on what they were seeing in their cities. It also describes how individuals decided to start staying at home even without official mandates. ]
Florida benefited from other advantages that made social distancing easier, public-health experts say. Apart from a handful of urban cores, Florida counties in general are less densely populated than those in hard-hit parts of the Northeast and Midwest. The landscape is replete with neatly spaced housing tracts. Residents rely mainly on cars to get around and public-transit options are limited.
Though work is still preliminary, several studies suggest that the coronavirus doesn’t spread as easily in balmy weather. On April 23, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued early research findings indicating that increased temperatures may help kill the virus and reduce transmission.