> Florida arrested a statistician who was attempting to publish the real death toll. So can we seriously accept thier count as the truth?
If you actually want to know, the answer is "look at excess deaths." You can game the numbers for confirmed COVID deaths by doing less testing but it's a lot harder to hide the raw number of people dying. Per NYT[1], as of March 6, 2021 (which is when their data ends), Florida had 31,616 confirmed COVID deaths and 35,900 excess deaths (1.14 excess deaths per COVID death, 1,671 excess deaths per million) and California had 51,974 COVID / 69,800 excess (1.34 excess deaths per COVID death, 1,767 excess deaths per million). Since then California's wave has subsided a bit faster than Florida's but either way the difference in outcomes between the two states is very small.
> California and New York were hit before they could implement lockdowns.
This is true of New York. It is not true of California.
California was not hit particularly hard
before it could implement lockdowns, and in fact before winter of 2020 it was doing much better than most states. In the first 6 months after people started taking COVID seriously (mid March 2020 to mid September 2020), about 15,000 Californians died of confirmed COVID cases, or about 375 people per million (and excess deaths track at pretty much a constant multiple with the level of confirmed COVID deaths). Since mid October, there have been another 48,000 confirmed COVID deaths in California. 35,000 of those happened in the 3 month period between December 1 2020 and March 1 2021. Not coincidentally, that period is also when restrictions were at their most severe: starting around November 25, outdoor dining was banned, parks and beaches and campgrounds were closed, a curfew was put into effect, travel was restricted, and so on. Cases continued to rise for the following month after that, peaking in early January.
Really, there is significant reason to doubt that government-imposed restrictions (as opposed to behavior changes people were going to make whether they were mandatory or not), as they were actually implemented in the US, had very much positive impact at all. It's not so much a question of "are the deaths ok?" as it is one of "is this actually helping, or is it just doing something visible so that the politicians can say they tried?".
I know this is an emotionally charged topic, and we probably won't have a clear picture of what worked and didn't work for at least a few years. But certainly government-mandated restrictions were not a slam-dunk obviously effective and worthwhile solution in the way that vaccines were.