COVID-19: If you take the Blue States out…
I haven’t written about COVID for awhile — it’s depressing labeling plot axes with deaths or mortality, but yesterday a couple comments from Trump and his press secretary made me go back into the data.
Trump, in his typical effort to divide the country said:
If you take the blue states out, we’re at a level that I don’t think anybody in the world would be at.
On the same day his press secretary Kayleigh McEnany was busy twisting statistics into pretzel-like objects:
Q Yes, but — no, look at the global numbers that I’m giving you, which is 4 percent of the population, 24 percent of the deaths from COVID. Isn’t that — how can that be a success?
MS. MCENANY: Yes, and I’m giving you the numbers that we believe are very indicative of where we stand vis-à-vis the rest of the world. Excess mortality is an indicator that takes into account the percent deaths above what would occur without a pandemic. It counts the excess mortality.
And what we see is that we are 28 percent —
Q But what about the numbers I gave you? MS. MCENANY: — under Europe. You have to look at this holistically. You have to look at total and aggregate —
Q But (inaudible) global number.
MS. MCENANY: — how many deaths have occurred in this country, and compare that to Europe and the excess mortality rate and case fatality and testing. We have exceeded in our response, and this President is very proud of the great work that this administration has done.
Let’s compare blue states, red states, and Europe and see what the data tells us.
The running totals for cases and deaths in the US broken down by blue and red states (based on 2016 presidential election results)are:
We can clearly see the major timeline of the pandemic across these two groups: the blue states suffered much more heavily during the first wave, then in June after the lockdown ended the number of infections in red states accelerated quickly, followed sometime later by deaths. At this point in mid-September the red states have experienced far more total cases and have almost caught up in total deaths. At the current rate of new deaths the red states are even likely to surpass the blue states by November 3rd, a date which I picked completely out of the air.
Total numbers only tell part of the story. Since red states and blue states don’t have the same total population, we need to normalize the data by expressing it in per capita numbers. This is a concept that the President appears to have considerable difficulty with.
Here we can see that the cumulative infection rate (cumulative infections/population) is actually higher for the red states but the blue states still have a considerably higher population mortality rate than the red states (733 per million deaths for the blue states vs. 485 for the red ones).
Now let’s compare these per capita numbers with Europe as a whole:
One can see clearly that both the blue and red states are faring much worse than Europe on a per capita basis. Europe got the worst of the pandemic early and led in terms of population mortality only until early April at which point the US blue states surged ahead. The cumulative mortality rate in the red states then caught up to Europe and surpassed it easily by late July.
Comparing the European countries and US states with over 1M population we can see that the worst hit US states are both red and blue and in general worse off than the most impacted countries in Europe.
Many of us remember Italy as being ground zero of the pandemic in Europe but Italy’s absolute death toll has since been surpassed by the UK (42k dead vs 36k) and it’s per capita mortality rate has been surpassed by Belgium, Spain, and the UK. Louisiana and Mississippi, both deep red states, have mortality rates between 1.5 and twice that of Italy and both are worse than the hardest hit European country Belgium. Arizona and Michigan are both important swing states in the 2020 elections and their mortality rates are almost as bad as Belgium.
As usual the jupyter notebooks behind this post are on GitHub, specifically:
