I think California having the lowest Covid-19 rate in the nation has helped its reputation a lot. We’ve traditionally caught a lot of flack for woo woo crystal healing but it seems Texas and Florida are totally stealing our thunder these days.
Considering how diverse California's demographic composition is, as opposed to say, Vermont, they deserve credit for doing better than the country as a whole.
There might be some to that, but having bottom quartile infection rates while containing an eighth of the US population seems like a strong statement from any angle.
Infection rates are, by definition, adjusted for population. In a pandemic, you may want to talk about rates given population density, but California is in the middle of the pack there (even Florida is more dense.)
