Which States Did Best During the Pandemic?

M

Mina

Verified User
Figuring out which states had the best pandemic performance can be tough for a few reasons. One of the biggest is that standards about when to label something a COVID death varied from state to state. Also, there are arguments about whether certain policies may have done more overall harm than good (e.g., tight lockdowns that may have saved people from COVID, but resulted in more indirect deaths from isolation, by way of suicide or drug overdoses).

There is a way around those problems, though. Simply compare the number of people who died in each state to the number who were expected to die based on pre-pandemic mortality rates in the state. For example, if, on average, 0.8% of the population of a state died per year, between 2015 and 2019, and then 1.0% died per year during the pandemic, that means people were dying at a 25% higher rate than normal.

Many of those extra deaths may be by way of indirect mechanisms (e.g., overwhelmed hospitals having more traffic-accident victims dying because ICU's were full of COVID patients), but either way it implicates state policy decisions.

So, in those terms, which places were most successful at minimizing the mortality impact of the pandemic on their people? Excluding N.C. (which has data gaps), here they are, best to worst:

State Excess Death% Observed Deaths Expected Deaths
Hawaii 3.04% 26174 25402
New Hampshire 5.16% 28942 27521
Massachusetts 8.58% 139194 128198
Maine 8.75% 34494 31718
Puerto Rico 8.89% 69055 63417
Nebraska 11.53% 40828 36607
Washington 11.56% 138918 124521
Minnesota 11.67% 108391 97064
Rhode Island 12.02% 24992 22311
District of Columbia 12.02% 15276 13637
Maryland 12.02% 123409 110163
Iowa 12.06% 73077 65215
Wisconsin 12.77% 129655 114973
Pennsylvania 13.59% 328603 289288
Delaware 14.07% 23947 20993
Connecticut 14.15% 77693 68061
North Dakota 14.27% 17687 15478
Ohio 14.44% 308283 269394
Vermont 14.56% 13769 12019
Missouri 14.59% 160949 140456
Oregon 15.57% 89970 77851
Utah 15.79% 48250 41669
Virginia 15.81% 174183 150404
Indiana 15.86% 166481 143696
New York 16.04% 247177 213006
South Dakota 16.23% 20449 17594
Kansas 16.28% 66103 56848
Idaho 16.32% 36822 31655
Illinois 16.86% 263366 225378
Florida 16.86% 534842 457672
New Jersey 16.90% 188733 161452
Kentucky 17.02% 122322 104529
United States 17.69% 7229063 6142422
Michigan 17.91% 244404 207280
Colorado 18.24% 101908 86191
Arkansas 18.46% 82350 69517
Tennessee 18.65% 194240 163704
California 19.09% 689587 579070
Oklahoma 19.13% 101494 85196
Montana 19.29% 26104 21883
West Virginia 19.55% 58182 48669
Nevada 19.61% 69393 58018
South Carolina 19.61% 130269 108907
Louisiana 20.28% 119247 99141
Alabama 20.97% 138024 114102
Georgia 22.49% 227503 185733
Alaska 22.70% 11546 9410
Wyoming 23.58% 12097 9789
New Mexico 24.53% 50568 40608
Texas 24.84% 555628 445085
Mississippi 25.22% 84259 67287
Arizona 26.53% 169159 133692

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
 
Interesting. And not surprising that the poorer states fared worse. This is the kind of data that the "Covid is a hoax" types can't dispute. Well, they'll try.
 
ThatOwlWoman said:
Interesting. And not surprising that the poorer states fared worse. This is the kind of data that the "Covid is a hoax" types can't dispute. Well, they'll try.
Click to expand...

Overall, poorer states did worse, but it's far from a consistent pattern. Like Maine is the 12th-poorest state in the US, by GDP per capita. At $55,425, it's neck-and-neck with Louisiana, and quite a bit poorer than Arizona, Texas, Wyoming, and Alaska. In fact Wyoming and Alaska are two of our richest states, in GDP per capita terms. Alaska is over 35% richer than Maine, per capita. Rhode Island is another outlier -- 19th poorest state in the union, yet a top performer during COVID.

I think liberalism ended up being an advantage for poorer liberal states, while conservatism was a disadvantage for richer conservative ones.

Anyway, what this data is also good for is performing a reality check on ideas such as the one that vaccines were deadlier than the virus. You can check vaccine rates and excess death rates and confirm that places with more vaccination had their mortality rates spike higher. It's also a reality check on the idea that COVID lockdowns caused a lot of death by way of depression, drug abuse, and economic collapse. It turns out that generally states that locked down less had higher mortality, which is the opposite of what that hypothesis would predict.
 
Nordberg said:
Some states, like Florida, quit reporting the data.
Click to expand...

Yes, some states were terrible about reporting testing results, including Florida. But the nice thing is that nearly all states were at least consistent about reporting how many deaths were in the state, since that's a kind of reporting they were doing to the CDC from long before the pandemic. So, even if they were doing their best to hide COVID mortality for political reasons, all those extra bodies were still showing up in the reports, even if the causes of death were being misattributed. So, the analysis I provided above would still show that as excess deaths.
 
Mina said:
Overall, poorer states did worse, but it's far from a consistent pattern. Like Maine is the 12th-poorest state in the US, by GDP per capita. At $55,425, it's neck-and-neck with Louisiana, and quite a bit poorer than Arizona, Texas, Wyoming, and Alaska. In fact Wyoming and Alaska are two of our richest states, in GDP per capita terms. Alaska is over 35% richer than Maine, per capita. Rhode Island is another outlier -- 19th poorest state in the union, yet a top performer during COVID.

I think liberalism ended up being an advantage for poorer liberal states, while conservatism was a disadvantage for richer conservative ones.

Anyway, what this data is also good for is performing a reality check on ideas such as the one that vaccines were deadlier than the virus. You can check vaccine rates and excess death rates and confirm that places with more vaccination had their mortality rates spike higher. It's also a reality check on the idea that COVID lockdowns caused a lot of death by way of depression, drug abuse, and economic collapse. It turns out that generally states that locked down less had higher mortality, which is the opposite of what that hypothesis would predict.
Click to expand...

I did notice that it was all over the place. Maine might have done better due to lower population density. We live in the U.P. of Michigan, another sparsely-populated area. We fared a lot better than did downstate Michigan. No doubt this data will be analyzed down to the county level by and by.
 
ThatOwlWoman said:
I did notice that it was all over the place. Maine might have done better due to lower population density. We live in the U.P. of Michigan, another sparsely-populated area. We fared a lot better than did downstate Michigan. No doubt this data will be analyzed down to the county level by and by.
Click to expand...

I have thought about doing some sort of scoring system where I graded each state in a way that factored in difficulty scale. For example states with a low weighted population density had lower difficulty. States with mild and humid climates had a lower degree of difficulty. So did states with younger median ages or higher GDP per capita. I’m not sure how I would weight each of those things, but I think if you came up with the difficulty index, you could get a better view for how policies worked in each area. The same is true internationally.
 
Mina said:
Figuring out which states had the best pandemic performance can be tough for a few reasons. One of the biggest is that standards about when to label something a COVID death varied from state to state. Also, there are arguments about whether certain policies may have done more overall harm than good (e.g., tight lockdowns that may have saved people from COVID, but resulted in more indirect deaths from isolation, by way of suicide or drug overdoses).

There is a way around those problems, though. Simply compare the number of people who died in each state to the number who were expected to die based on pre-pandemic mortality rates in the state. For example, if, on average, 0.8% of the population of a state died per year, between 2015 and 2019, and then 1.0% died per year during the pandemic, that means people were dying at a 25% higher rate than normal.

Many of those extra deaths may be by way of indirect mechanisms (e.g., overwhelmed hospitals having more traffic-accident victims dying because ICU's were full of COVID patients), but either way it implicates state policy decisions.

So, in those terms, which places were most successful at minimizing the mortality impact of the pandemic on their people? Excluding N.C. (which has data gaps), here they are, best to worst:

State Excess Death% Observed Deaths Expected Deaths
Hawaii 3.04% 26174 25402
New Hampshire 5.16% 28942 27521
Massachusetts 8.58% 139194 128198
Maine 8.75% 34494 31718
Puerto Rico 8.89% 69055 63417
Nebraska 11.53% 40828 36607
Washington 11.56% 138918 124521
Minnesota 11.67% 108391 97064
Rhode Island 12.02% 24992 22311
District of Columbia 12.02% 15276 13637
Maryland 12.02% 123409 110163
Iowa 12.06% 73077 65215
Wisconsin 12.77% 129655 114973
Pennsylvania 13.59% 328603 289288
Delaware 14.07% 23947 20993
Connecticut 14.15% 77693 68061
North Dakota 14.27% 17687 15478
Ohio 14.44% 308283 269394
Vermont 14.56% 13769 12019
Missouri 14.59% 160949 140456
Oregon 15.57% 89970 77851
Utah 15.79% 48250 41669
Virginia 15.81% 174183 150404
Indiana 15.86% 166481 143696
New York 16.04% 247177 213006
South Dakota 16.23% 20449 17594
Kansas 16.28% 66103 56848
Idaho 16.32% 36822 31655
Illinois 16.86% 263366 225378
Florida 16.86% 534842 457672
New Jersey 16.90% 188733 161452
Kentucky 17.02% 122322 104529
United States 17.69% 7229063 6142422
Michigan 17.91% 244404 207280
Colorado 18.24% 101908 86191
Arkansas 18.46% 82350 69517
Tennessee 18.65% 194240 163704
California 19.09% 689587 579070
Oklahoma 19.13% 101494 85196
Montana 19.29% 26104 21883
West Virginia 19.55% 58182 48669
Nevada 19.61% 69393 58018
South Carolina 19.61% 130269 108907
Louisiana 20.28% 119247 99141
Alabama 20.97% 138024 114102
Georgia 22.49% 227503 185733
Alaska 22.70% 11546 9410
Wyoming 23.58% 12097 9789
New Mexico 24.53% 50568 40608
Texas 24.84% 555628 445085
Mississippi 25.22% 84259 67287
Arizona 26.53% 169159 133692

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
Click to expand...

Don't see NC listed
 
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