Two Years of COVID, by state

M

Mina

Verified User
Since different states used different standards when deciding when to attribute deaths to COVID, using their self-reported numbers can be misleading. But where we can do a clear comparison is in terms of how much mortality was elevated in each place, during the pandemic. If, for example, in the five years before COVID an average of 1% of the population died per year, and then during COVID it was an average of 1.25%, that's a 25% elevation of mortality.

Using that method, I put together a visualizer that allows you to watch two years of COVID play out over 45 seconds, with the cumulative percentage of excess mortality for each state.

You can see that early on states like NJ, NY, and CT got hit hardest. Over time, though, other states wound up moving ahead. Eventually, looking at a two-year period from the start of April 2020 to the end of March 2022, AZ, MS, and TX wound up having the worst cumulative performance:

https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/9658616/

<div class="flourish-embed flourish-bar-chart-race" data-src="visualisation/9658616"><script src="https://public.flourish.studio/resources/embed.js"></script></div>
 
Mina said:
Since different states used different standards when deciding when to attribute deaths to COVID, using their self-reported numbers can be misleading. But where we can do a clear comparison is in terms of how much mortality was elevated in each place, during the pandemic. If, for example, in the five years before COVID an average of 1% of the population died per year, and then during COVID it was an average of 1.25%, that's a 25% elevation of mortality.

Using that method, I put together a visualizer that allows you to watch two years of COVID play out over 45 seconds, with the cumulative percentage of excess mortality for each state.

You can see that early on states like NJ, NY, and CT got hit hardest. Over time, though, other states wound up moving ahead. Eventually, looking at a two-year period from the start of April 2020 to the end of March 2022, AZ, MS, and TX wound up having the worst cumulative performance:

https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/9658616/

<div class="flourish-embed flourish-bar-chart-race" data-src="visualisation/9658616"><script src="https://public.flourish.studio/resources/embed.js"></script></div>
Click to expand...

You might note, that two groups in AZ got hit hardest: Native Americans and Hispanics. I'd note that Native Americans also got hit very hard during the 1918 Spanish Influenza epidemic. The reason for that in their case is they live in relative isolation to the general population so have less exposure to herd immunity in general.
 
T. A. Gardner said:
You might note, that two groups in AZ got hit hardest: Native Americans and Hispanics. I'd note that Native Americans also got hit very hard during the 1918 Spanish Influenza epidemic. The reason for that in their case is they live in relative isolation to the general population so have less exposure to herd immunity in general.
Click to expand...

Yes. I expect that New Mexico also did worse because of the Native American population. The Native American population is twice as high there, in percentage terms, as it is in Arizona.

My guess would be that it's less about recent isolation, and more about historical isolation.... similar to the reason that much of the New World population got wiped out be diseases in the generations after Columbus, while the Old World didn't suffer that same level of catastrophe. For various reasons (covered by Jared Diamond in Germs, Guns, and Steel), Old-Worlders had just been dealing with nastier bugs for a whole lot longer, so they'd evolved to handle them better. Possibly, Western European and Asian ancestors were people who'd survived many generations of some nasty coronaviruses, and so this particular one killed fewer of their descendants, whereas the bodies of people with relatively pure New World blood may have found this novel virus a whole lot more novel than it was to others.

It would be interesting to get these same numbers broken out by ethnicity, to see how that plays out. I don't have a data source for that, though.
 
Since everyone likes to slam Florida I think we should look at blue states that did worse than Florida on a per capital rate.

Arizona
New Jersey
Michigan
Georgia
New Mexico
New York
Pennsylvania
Nevada
 
Mina said:
Since different states used different standards when deciding when to attribute deaths to COVID, using their self-reported numbers can be misleading. But where we can do a clear comparison is in terms of how much mortality was elevated in each place, during the pandemic. If, for example, in the five years before COVID an average of 1% of the population died per year, and then during COVID it was an average of 1.25%, that's a 25% elevation of mortality.

Using that method, I put together a visualizer that allows you to watch two years of COVID play out over 45 seconds, with the cumulative percentage of excess mortality for each state.

You can see that early on states like NJ, NY, and CT got hit hardest. Over time, though, other states wound up moving ahead. Eventually, looking at a two-year period from the start of April 2020 to the end of March 2022, AZ, MS, and TX wound up having the worst cumulative performance:

https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/9658616/

<div class="flourish-embed flourish-bar-chart-race" data-src="visualisation/9658616"><script src="https://public.flourish.studio/resources/embed.js"></script></div>
Click to expand...
Your chart is USLESS unless it is done on a per capita rate.
 
ExpressLane said:
Your chart is USLESS unless it is done on a per capita rate.
Click to expand...

It is a per capita rate. As I mentioned in my post, if the state formerly had 1% annualized mortality, and during the pandemic had 1.25%, that's a 25% increase. The 1% and 1.25% are each per-capita numbers. Population is the denominator in each case.

It's done that way in order to have a meaningful comparison between states regardless of population growth. So, for example, if a state grew 2%, then other things being equal we'd expect mortality to have also gone up 2%. But, by using per-capita numbers for both the pre-pandemic and the pandemic eras, you automatically account for population growth (or shrinkage). Thus, when they used to have one death for every 100 residents per year, and then in the pandemic they had 1.25 deaths for every 100 residents per year, that's a 25% rise, and it's not skewed by growing or shrinking population over time.
 
Mina said:
Since different states used different standards when deciding when to attribute deaths to COVID, using their self-reported numbers can be misleading. But where we can do a clear comparison is in terms of how much mortality was elevated in each place, during the pandemic. If, for example, in the five years before COVID an average of 1% of the population died per year, and then during COVID it was an average of 1.25%, that's a 25% elevation of mortality.

Using that method, I put together a visualizer that allows you to watch two years of COVID play out over 45 seconds, with the cumulative percentage of excess mortality for each state.

You can see that early on states like NJ, NY, and CT got hit hardest. Over time, though, other states wound up moving ahead. Eventually, looking at a two-year period from the start of April 2020 to the end of March 2022, AZ, MS, and TX wound up having the worst cumulative performance:

https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/9658616/

<div class="flourish-embed flourish-bar-chart-race" data-src="visualisation/9658616"><script src="https://public.flourish.studio/resources/embed.js"></script></div>
Click to expand...
And Florida. But that was by design.

If trump hadn't attempted to keep the trump virus secret, the early numbers in NY/NJ would never have been so high.
 
Mina said:
Since different states used different standards when deciding when to attribute deaths to COVID, using their self-reported numbers can be misleading. But where we can do a clear comparison is in terms of how much mortality was elevated in each place, during the pandemic. If, for example, in the five years before COVID an average of 1% of the population died per year, and then during COVID it was an average of 1.25%, that's a 25% elevation of mortality.

Using that method, I put together a visualizer that allows you to watch two years of COVID play out over 45 seconds, with the cumulative percentage of excess mortality for each state.

You can see that early on states like NJ, NY, and CT got hit hardest. Over time, though, other states wound up moving ahead. Eventually, looking at a two-year period from the start of April 2020 to the end of March 2022, AZ, MS, and TX wound up having the worst cumulative performance:

https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/9658616/

<div class="flourish-embed flourish-bar-chart-race" data-src="visualisation/9658616"><script src="https://public.flourish.studio/resources/embed.js"></script></div>
Click to expand...

Very cool, thank you. I think NM is an outlier. 1) it's not really a blue state, and 2) it got hit so hard because so many of the elders of the Navajo Nation passed.
 
Mina said:
Since different states used different standards when deciding when to attribute deaths to COVID, using their self-reported numbers can be misleading. But where we can do a clear comparison is in terms of how much mortality was elevated in each place, during the pandemic. If, for example, in the five years before COVID an average of 1% of the population died per year, and then during COVID it was an average of 1.25%, that's a 25% elevation of mortality.

Using that method, I put together a visualizer that allows you to watch two years of COVID play out over 45 seconds, with the cumulative percentage of excess mortality for each state.

You can see that early on states like NJ, NY, and CT got hit hardest. Over time, though, other states wound up moving ahead. Eventually, looking at a two-year period from the start of April 2020 to the end of March 2022, AZ, MS, and TX wound up having the worst cumulative performance:

https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/9658616/

<div class="flourish-embed flourish-bar-chart-race" data-src="visualisation/9658616"><script src="https://public.flourish.studio/resources/embed.js"></script></div>
Click to expand...

Out of curiosity, which data source did you use?
 
Althea said:
And Florida. But that was by design.

If trump hadn't attempted to keep the trump virus secret, the early numbers in NY/NJ would never have been so high.
Click to expand...

To be fair, Florida didn't do all that badly, despite what I think were truly terrible policy choices. It wound up totally middle-of-the-road. That comes with a couple asterisks, though:

(1) Florida did really well early on, because of the travel lockdown. Its pre-pandemic mortality averages were set back when it had huge numbers of tourists coming to the state.... some of whom would die. When suddenly it didn't have huge numbers of tourists coming, that meant vastly fewer tourist deaths, driving down its average mortality. If you measured just from when tourism started back in the state in earnest, it did much worse.

(2) It's a humid state with weather that's conducive to outdoor gathering, which made it easier to prevent transmission. Hawaii, which had similar advantages, wound up with the best performance in the country. Puerto Rico had the third-best. So, if you treated those as climate peers, Florida did quite poorly.

Still, credit where do, it did better than I'd have expected.... likely due to a high vaccination rate (highest of any red state).
 
Mina said:
Yes. I expect that New Mexico also did worse because of the Native American population. The Native American population is twice as high there, in percentage terms, as it is in Arizona.

My guess would be that it's less about recent isolation, and more about historical isolation.... similar to the reason that much of the New World population got wiped out be diseases in the generations after Columbus, while the Old World didn't suffer that same level of catastrophe. For various reasons (covered by Jared Diamond in Germs, Guns, and Steel), Old-Worlders had just been dealing with nastier bugs for a whole lot longer, so they'd evolved to handle them better. Possibly, Western European and Asian ancestors were people who'd survived many generations of some nasty coronaviruses, and so this particular one killed fewer of their descendants, whereas the bodies of people with relatively pure New World blood may have found this novel virus a whole lot more novel than it was to others.

It would be interesting to get these same numbers broken out by ethnicity, to see how that plays out. I don't have a data source for that, though.
Click to expand...

It could also be genetic since many Hispanics are at least part Native American too.
 
ThatOwlWoman said:
Very cool, thank you. I think NM is an outlier. 1) it's not really a blue state, and 2) it got hit so hard because so many of the elders of the Navajo Nation passed.
Click to expand...

I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about NM and NE, because they are outliers -- the only terribly performing Biden state and the only well-performing Trump state, respectively. I'm not sure there are many lessons we can learn from NM about what to avoid, since I think largely they suffered because of such a high Native American population. But I think there's probably more we can learn from NE, since they figured out how to do pretty well despite the usual right-wing opposition to vaccines, masking, and distancing, which makes me wonder what their "secret ingredient" was.
 
T. A. Gardner said:
It could also be genetic since many Hispanics are at least part Native American too.
Click to expand...

My guess is that Hispanics don't have any particular susceptibility to the virus. I guess that mostly based on the fact Puerto Rico had the third-lowest mortality elevation during the pandemic, while having a higher share of Hispanics than any of the other places. NJ and NY also have fairly high percentage of Hispanics (8th and 9th among the states), and seem to have done pretty well for themselves in the long run. But, I guess the proof will be in the disaggregated data. I look forward to what the epidemiologists come up with in coming years, when they do the post-mortem on this pandemic.
 
Mina said:
To be fair, Florida didn't do all that badly, despite what I think were truly terrible policy choices. It wound up totally middle-of-the-road. That comes with a couple asterisks, though:

(1) Florida did really well early on, because of the travel lockdown. Its pre-pandemic mortality averages were set back when it had huge numbers of tourists coming to the state.... some of whom would die. When suddenly it didn't have huge numbers of tourists coming, that meant vastly fewer tourist deaths, driving down its average mortality. If you measured just from when tourism started back in the state in earnest, it did much worse.

(2) It's a humid state with weather that's conducive to outdoor gathering, which made it easier to prevent transmission. Hawaii, which had similar advantages, wound up with the best performance in the country. Puerto Rico had the third-best. So, if you treated those as climate peers, Florida did quite poorly.

Still, credit where do, it did better than I'd have expected.... likely due to a high vaccination rate (highest of any red state).
Click to expand...
I didn't check your link, because I know the results just from paying attention for two years.

The reason Fla is worse than the northeast, is because Fla. had a jump on the information. NY/NJ didn't. Fla. chose to open up its economy despite knowing the risks. The numbers were being hidden from the public, so their results are far worse than you think.


But...to choose revenue over lives is the height of incompetence. DeSantis killed 35,000 people between July/Sept. last year. Similar in Texas.

The port cities paid the price for trump's incompetence, and crafted policy to stem the destruction. States that witnessed said devastation and ignored common sense protocols should be ashamed. But they're Red states. They don't know shame.
 
Mina said:
To be fair, Florida didn't do all that badly, despite what I think were truly terrible policy choices. It wound up totally middle-of-the-road. That comes with a couple asterisks, though:

(1) Florida did really well early on, because of the travel lockdown. Its pre-pandemic mortality averages were set back when it had huge numbers of tourists coming to the state.... some of whom would die. When suddenly it didn't have huge numbers of tourists coming, that meant vastly fewer tourist deaths, driving down its average mortality. If you measured just from when tourism started back in the state in earnest, it did much worse.

(2) It's a humid state with weather that's conducive to outdoor gathering, which made it easier to prevent transmission. Hawaii, which had similar advantages, wound up with the best performance in the country. Puerto Rico had the third-best. So, if you treated those as climate peers, Florida did quite poorly.

Still, credit where do, it did better than I'd have expected.... likely due to a high vaccination rate (highest of any red state).
Click to expand...

In addition, Florida, along with most other States, had a grace period from the time Covid paralyzed NY till it hit them, in other words, time to understand more about the virus and how it spread, yet, a good number of those States didn't benefit from the knowledge
 
Mina said:
I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about NM and NE, because they are outliers -- the only terribly performing Biden state and the only well-performing Trump state, respectively. I'm not sure there are many lessons we can learn from NM about what to avoid, since I think largely they suffered because of such a high Native American population. But I think there's probably more we can learn from NE, since they figured out how to do pretty well despite the usual right-wing opposition to vaccines, masking, and distancing, which makes me wonder what their "secret ingredient" was.
Click to expand...

Nebraska ranks forty third out of the fifty States in terms of population density (https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_population_density), with Ohama being its only large city, so a virus spread by social contact would have a harder time proliferating the population than in other States
 
Mina said:
I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about NM and NE, because they are outliers -- the only terribly performing Biden state and the only well-performing Trump state, respectively. I'm not sure there are many lessons we can learn from NM about what to avoid, since I think largely they suffered because of such a high Native American population. But I think there's probably more we can learn from NE, since they figured out how to do pretty well despite the usual right-wing opposition to vaccines, masking, and distancing, which makes me wonder what their "secret ingredient" was.
Click to expand...

You know what it might be? Politeness. I saw the same thing here with the RWers on local social media, screaming about the masks and vax. The whole country saw the idiots invade Lansing over that. Yet during the entire time when masks were mandatory, I saw only four ppl without them. And one was obese and using a mobility scooter. Even after the mandate was lifted, most ppl still wore masks. Why? Because despite what they might scream on the Internet, ppl here are very polite.
 
archives said:
Nebraska ranks forty third out of the fifty States in terms of population density (https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_population_density), with Ohama being its only large city, so a virus spread by social contact would have a harder time proliferating the population than in other States
Click to expand...

I'm sure that must have made things easier for the. But there were a number of other low-density red states that did pretty horribly (e.g., Wyoming). So, I'm still open to the idea that they were doing something else right that helped them succeed where every other red state failed.
 
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