Co-Vid Effects in California and Texas

 

When I shared on Facebook a statement by California governor Newsom that the state had come out of Co-Vid fairly well, my cousin in Texas objected, pointing to the severity of California’s “shutdown.”   Back in 2020 and 2021, I’d compiled statistics on mortality rates due to CoVid-19 around the world, but I thought I’d look again, now that the pandemic has more or less ended.

            Statistics from the California Department of Public Health (reported February 2023) show more than 100,000 Californians died of CoVid.  The next highest deaths were in other populous states:  Texas, Florida, New York.  However, according to the LA Times tracking website, the results look different when deaths are calculated as a percentage of residents.  Califorinia deaths equaled 255 per 100,000 residents, whereas ten states had cumulative death rates of more than 416 per 100,000 residents.  These were:  Arizona, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Tennessee, West Virginia, Arkansas, New Mexico, Alabama, Michigan, Florida.

            Until last April, Johns Hopkins was charting cases and deaths state by state.  On March 11, 2023, their data showed:

                        CA   deaths per hundred thousand:     256

                        TX   deaths per hundred thousand:     322

         Back in March, 2021, California’s mortality rate was 137 per 100,000, which was lower than the national average of 158 per 100,000; at that time the rate in Texas was 153 per 100,000 and New York’s rate was 245 per 100,000 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, quoted in the Austin American-Statesman newspaper). 

         It is true that California businesses were hit quite hard.  Almost one-third of California’s restaurants went out of business during the pandemic, and up to one million people in the service industry lost their jobs (report in California Business Journal). 

         Nationwide, pandemic deaths and pandemic job loss were inversely related.  According to a report in The Lancet, March 23, 2023, mandated restaurant closures and increased mask use were associated with larger falls in employment.  Less mask use, etc. was closely tied with high employment, but these states had more CoVid-19 deaths.

            The same article states that “US states with higher poverty, lower rates of educational attainment, less access to quality health care, and lower levels of interpersonal trust (trust in others) experienced disproportionately higher rates of SARS-CoV-2 infections and COVID-19 deaths.”  These were also the states with the highest percentages of black residents, and where “high percentages of people voted for the Republican presidential candidate in the 2020 election, such as Texas, Mississippi, Georgia, and Alabama.” 

            The article notes that although masks and “mobility restrictions” led to lower infection rates, it was vaccine coverage that was associated with lower COVID-19 death rates.   (Among all Californians, 73.3% are fully vaccinated.)