All 8 of America’s Worst-Hit Coronavirus States Are Now in the South

 

 

The data-source used here is the most-comprehensive and up-to-the-minute of all websites about the covid-19 global pandemic: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/.  The columns there that are the basis of these rankings are the two that are headed “Tot Cases/1M pop” and “Deaths/1M pop”. To see either column’s entries in rank-order, just click onto that column’s heading.

 

The states which will be boldfaced in this report are states that voted for Trump (shown as the red states on this map). Non-boldfaced states voted for the Democratic Party’s nominee. 

 

In order, starting with the state that has America’s highest percentage of its population who have been diagnosed with the coronavirus-19 (or “covid-19”) virus, the worst 11 states, in that rank-order, are: Louisiana, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, Iowa, Arkansas, and Texas. 

 

The only far-southern state that’s not among those 11 worst-hit states is New Mexico, which is a remarkable exception, because it is actually far better than the U.S. average of 21,132 coronavirus-19 (or covid-19) cases per million of population: N.M. That state has only 13,121 cases per million, which places it as the 15th-best state. By contrast, Texas is the 11th-worst at 24,873, and Louisiana is the #1 worst state, at 34,680. N.M is also the only far-southern state which did not vote for Trump. All of the 11 worst-hit states (in terms of infection-rates) voted for Trump in 2016. 

 

(Here are the detailed data on that: In “Tot Cases/1M pop”, Louisiana is 34,680, Florida is 31,914, Mississippi is 31,435, Alabama is 29,732, Arizona is 29,435, Georgia is 28,835, Tennessee is 26,872, South Carolina is 26,746, Iowa is 25,557, Arkansas is 25,092,  Texas is 25,017, and the twelfth-worst, New York, is 24,865.)

 

In terms of the worst-hit state regarding its percentage who have died from the infection, those are predominantly states which had terribly high infection-rates back in March and April, and so the worst four, starting with the very highest death-rate state, are: New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, all of which voted against Trump. The 5th-worst on covid death-rates is Louisiana. So: high death-rates follow after high infection-rates. Consequently, perhaps the most effective way to keep the death-rates down is to keep the infection-rates down. Generally speaking, the states which, now — more than six months into this epidemic in America — will have the highest death-rates from this disease, will probably be the states that now have the highest rates of the infection. So: the current infection-rates may reasonably be considered to be fairly reliable predictors of what the final covid death-rate in a given state will likely be.

 

The states that have the lowest infection-rates, starting with the best, are: Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire, Oregon, West Virginia, Hawaii, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, and Washington, as constituting the top ten.

 

The states that have the lowest death-rates are, again starting with the best: Alaska, Hawaii, Wyoming, Vermont, Maine, Oregon, Utah, Montana, West Virginia, and Kansas, as constituting the ten best. (Except for Utah, all ten of the lowest death-rate states were in the best 21 states on the lowness of infection-rates back on April 6th.)

 

Politically, the coronavirus-worst states at the start of the epidemic were predominantly Democratic states (perhaps because they tended to have more-concentrated, urban, populations), and the coronavirus-worst states, at the present time, are overwhelmingly Republican — and all of the 11 worst-hit are Republican — (perhaps because Republican states tend to be conservative and libertarian, and therefore oppose government regulations).

 

 

Politically, the most remarkable finding, thus far, is that now, over a half-year into the epidemic’s raging phase, all 11 of the most-infected states had voted for Trump in 2016. What might explain that finding? Maybe those were the places that were the least adhering to the facial masking and social distancing policies that were being applied in the countries that have the lowest rates of the infection, such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Taiwan, Thailand, China, Myanmar, and all of the others that have below 200 cases per million (as compared to America’s 21,136 cases per million, which is over a thousand times higher, at the present stage of this global pandemic). Worldwide, the rate is 4,013; so, America has over 5 times the global infection-rate. Only Vermont and Maine have lower infection-rates than that global average: Vermont’s is 2,748, and Maine’s is 3,778. Third-best is New Hampshire, at 5,845. Also remarkably, those are three adjoining states: America’s farthest-northeast.

 

On September 15th, Dr. Anthony Fauci said to Vermonters “I believe strongly that I’d do what you’ve been doing in Vermont in the rest of the country. … This is success because of what you did.” He added that “These public health principles don’t really change. Regardless of your size, they remain true. … Whether you are in Vermont or New York City downtown,” public-health protocols “work. They work in states with small numbers like Vermont, and in states with large numbers like New York and Texas and California. … It’s not a question of density or not, it’s a question of what you did or did not do correctly, and from what I’ve seen Vermont has done it correctly.” Hong Kong has 671 cases per million. NYC has 244,813 cases and 8.4 million population, so it has 29,144 cases per million. NYC’s rate is 43.4 times worse than Hong Kong’s. Vietnam’s Ho Chi Min City has 8.9 million population and 77 cases and no deaths. NYC’s cases-rate is 3,368 times higher. This sort of comparison has been noticed before, such as with regard to Tokyo. The U.S. economy is suffering hugely because of its stratospheric coronavirus-rates — not because of its (alleged-by-libertarians) over-application of measures to keep those rates down. It didn’t have to be this way. But it very much is.

 

The chart showing “Daily New Cases in the United States” indicates that, after having, for more than a month, been declining to a bottom of 25,411 new daily cases on September 7th, the number of new daily cases has risen slightly to 33,344 on September 20th.

 

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