We now have data for three years of COVID death rates. The first year, 2020, was almost over when the vaccine became available on December 13 of 2020. This graph shows how the disease progressed during the two years after vaccines became available. The rates shown in the above graph are not comparable with any of the other rates you might see because it takes the two years of data on the number of COVID deaths in each state and divides it by the average of the 2021 and 2022 populations divided by 100,000. The numbers shown on the map are simply the number of COVID deaths per 100,000 people for the two years vaccines were available.
Now being a sociologist when I see something like this I need to know what is causing differences this large in these supposedly United States. Comparing the highest, West Virginia, and lowest, Hawaii, states with a ranked list of 182 countries West Virginia is closest to the 36th highest country and Hawaii is closest to the 118th highest country. We in the United States dying far from United when it comes to our COVID death rates.
I have looked at several other variables to explain the differences in our state COVID death rates, percent of every state’s church going population that is an Evangelical and the percent of the state’s vote that was for Trump in the last presidential election. Statistically controlling for each other the effect of the Evangelical population is to increase the COVID death rate 2.28 deaths per 100,000 people for each percent of the church attending population that attends an Evangelical church. The effect of the Trump vote was an increase of the COVID death rate by 0.98 deaths per 100,000 people for each percent of the vote Trump got. Now since Trump got about twice as many votes as the Evangelical churches have members the total effect of each of these factors in increasing COVID deaths is close to equal. But, I haven’t figured out how to assign total numbers of COVID deaths each are responsible for. But statistically the two variables explain about 68 percent of the variation in our state COVID death rates. I can’t be very precise but I think it is safe to say that these two factors account for more than half of our total number of COVID deaths during these two years is 603,445 so I feel safe estimating they added more than 300,000 COVID deaths.
I am going to go ahead and submit this and hit the bed