I can speak for Florida.
The latest spike in the deaths were old people who would not take the vaccine. Old people tend to have other health issues, and this was it for them.
When it started to get really hot out, these people hung out inside with others, outside of their household, pretending that there was no pandemic.
I bet their families wish they had gotten the Vax.
Interesting... I've attached what CA reports for vaccination rates by age.
I don't know how our 74.5% full vaccination rate (+7.4% partial) compares to Florida for the 65+ age group.
I will say that 74.5% doesn't seem like a very high number to me.
Looking at this it suggests Florida has a much higher vaccination rate: http://ww11.doh.state.fl.us/comm/_partners/covid19_report_archive/covid19-data/covid19_data_latest.pdf
65+ is currently at 89% in Florida, significantly higher than California.
Florida does have more 65+ as a percentage of population than California does. So that could affect things.
Florida is about 4.6M out of 19.1M, or 24% of the population. That should leave about 500K unvaccinated elderly Floridians.
California has about 6.4M out of 40M, or 16% of the population. But California--and we'll add all first dose and fully vaccinated together for 81.9% rate, should have a population of about 1.15M unvaccinated elderly.
Yet with more than double the population of unvaccinated elderly residents, Florida was peaking at 300-400 deaths/day during Delta while California was seeing a maximum of ~200 a day.
Not even looking at elderly, California has double the population of Florida but a little over half the number of deaths per day. If we SWAG it and say that the elderly drive those death rates and [incorrectly] assume all deaths are 65+, California has MORE than double the unvaccinated population but is somewhere around 1/2 to 2/3 the peak daily death rate as Florida.
So I have to think it's more complicated than JUST reticence of some elderly Floridians to get the jab, because we have more elderly Californians AND a higher percentage of them aren't vaccinated than Florida, but a lower death rate.