The Homa Files

I’ve been digging into the surprisingly slow decline in the daily covid rates.

Let’s start with some state-by-state data…

Relevant time series data is hard to find, but I was able to find month ago cumulative covid deaths by state that I could match against current cumulative totals to calculate the number of deaths in the past month.

And, the answer is…

In total, there were just under 22,000 covid deaths in the US over the past month.

Data check: That’s about 750 deaths per day

10 states — which house about 1/2 of the US population — accounted for about 2/3’s of the total covid deaths in the past month.

Of course, the death count is a function of states’ population and their death rate (usually reported per million residents).

So, highly populated states  states are heavily represented in the Top 10, e.g. Florida, California, Texas and New York.

But, it’s not just a matter of population.

The death rate in Top 10 states is running about 20% higher than the national average … and is about 50% higher  than in the other 40 states (79.7 deaths per million  versus 51.4).

A couple of the Top 10 states had death rates that were below the national average: California, Texas and Ohio.

So, their presence on the Top 10 list can be mostly attributable to population.

Conversely, a couple of Top 10 states are still on fire…

Leading the pack: Heavily locked-down Michigan — which tops the Top 10 list — had more than triple the national average of covid deaths over the past month (215 deaths per million versus  to 67).

Pennsylvania and New Jersey each had more than 100 deaths per million in the past month.

Hmmm.

So, what explains the variance in death rates across states?

Spoiler alert: It’s not vaccination rates.

Stay tuned … more to come.

This entry was posted on May 26, 2021 at 10:19 am and is filed under COVID - vaccine, COVID-19 Tracking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.