Safest States During COVID-19 – WalletHub Study

I just got this report from WalletHub. My heart breaks that over 4000,000 people have died during this pandemic, that is more than all our soldiers who died in World War II. My heart is broken for some of the attitudes of Christians. I think they need to talk to those that have lost loved ones, put themselves in the shoes of people grieving the loss of loved ones.. like I minister to. I had one man tell me this week that “that’s not that many” can you believe that!!??!!?? That came from a man that professes to be a Christian! Horrible. One of the reasons we are in this horrific situation is that COVID has been made a political issues. SHAME!

If you want to apply for a first responder position or a nursing position then get busy! Face the battle. It is easy to sit at your computer or phone and spew forth nothing noise. My wife Sharon, a RN and our daughter Gretchen, a Respiratory Therapist, face COVID

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With only 0.62% of the population fully vaccinated against COVID-19 as of January 20, and vaccination being an essential component for full reopening of the economy, WalletHub today released its report on the Safest States During COVID-19, along with accompanying videos and audio files.

In order to find out the safest states during the COVID-19 pandemic, WalletHub compared the 50 states and the District of Columbia across five key metrics. Our data set includes the rates of COVID-19 transmission, positive testing, hospitalizations and death, as well as the share of the eligible population getting vaccinated. Below, you can see highlights from the report, along with a WalletHub Q&A.

Note: Rankings are based on data available as of 12:30 p.m. ET on Wednesday, January 20, 2021.

To view the full report and your state’s rank, please visit:
https://wallethub.com/edu/safest-states-during-covid/86567

Please let me know if you have any questions or if you would like to schedule a phone, Skype or in-studio interview with one of our analysts. Full data sets for specific states are also available upon request. In addition, feel free to embed this YouTube video summarizing the study on your website, and to use or edit these raw files (audio and video) as you see fit.

Best,
Diana Polk
WalletHub Communications Manager
(202) 684-6386

WalletHub Q&A

Why is a state’s level of safety so important for its economy?

“The level of safety in a state is crucial to its economy because it determines the way businesses are allowed to operate. States will not remove their current COVID-19 restrictions until certain safety benchmarks are met, such as the reduction of the transmission rate to specific levels. Until it is safe enough to remove these restrictions, business will continue to be stunted across the U.S.,” said Jill Gonzalez, WalletHub analyst. “The best way to help state economies is to get most people in each state vaccinated, which in turn will create a much safer environment and allow businesses to operate at normal capacity and hire in full force.”

What actions can residents take in order to increase the safety of their community and their state?

“The most important thing that residents can do to increase the safety of their community and state is to get vaccinated when they are eligible. While the vaccines being offered have a high efficacy, how well they are able to curb the pandemic also depends on the share of the population that chooses to get vaccinated,” said Jill Gonzalez, WalletHub analyst. “Until we achieve widespread vaccination and get the pandemic under control, people should continue to wear masks in public and practice social distancing to achieve the highest level of safety possible.”

Is there a strong correlation between a state’s vaccination rate and its death rate?

“At the moment, we have found a weak positive correlation between the vaccination rate ranking and the death rate ranking. In other words, as the vaccination rate increases, the death rate decreases,” said Jill Gonzalez, WalletHub analyst. “It’s important to consider the fact that vaccination has been slow so far, and only small portions of the population are eligible. In the future, we should expect a stronger correlation between the two variables as the vaccination rate increases.”

Does Alabama, the state with the highest death rate, lag behind in vaccination?

“In addition to having the highest death rate in the nation in the past week, at over 113 per million, Alabama also has the lowest share of the population age 16 and over who have received at least the first dose of the vaccine,” said Jill Gonzalez, WalletHub analyst. “Increasing the number of people vaccinated is essential for getting control of the pandemic.”

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Black Americans Need Action, Not More Navel-gazing

Contributor & author:  Marilyn M. Singleton, MD, JD, (Oakland-California) board-certified anesthesiologist and immediate past President of Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (see bio at bottom of release)

Preview: 

• While today’s social justice omphaloskeptics are pondering white privilege, Marxist critical race theory, and “the intersectionality of health equity,” COVID-19 is busy killing black and brown Americans.
• Black Americans continue to get infected and die from COVID-19 at rates more than 1.5 times their share of the population. Hispanic and Native Americans face similar disparities. Black Americans are twice as likely to be hospitalized as whites. Moreover, when admitted to the hospital, people from racial and ethnic minority groups were in worse shape than their white counterparts. Consequently, they were more likely to die.
• While hand-wringing over the tragic COVID patient deaths, the “chosen ones” silence discussion about preventive and early treatment. Senate hearings on the subject were ignored, even mocked. There’s no need for early treatment with safe medications because the (experimental) vaccine has arrived. Meanwhile people continue to needlessly die.

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January 19th, 2021

Black Americans Need Action, Not More Navel-gazing

by: Marilyn M. Singleton, MD, JD

On Martin Luther King, Jr.’s holiday, I’m reminded that Rev. King was not only a thinker but a man of action.

While today’s social justice omphaloskeptics are pondering white privilege, Marxist critical race theory, and “the intersectionality of health equity,” COVID-19 is busy killing black and brown Americans.

Black Americans continue to get infected and die from COVID-19 at rates more than 1.5 times their share of the population. Hispanic and Native Americans face similar disparities. Black Americans are twice as likely to be hospitalized as whites. Moreover, when admitted to the hospital, people from racial and ethnic minority groups were in worse shape than their white counterparts. Consequently, they were more likely to die.

No need to worry, President-elect Biden has promised a racial disparities task force in response to COVID. Gee, 35 years ago, the Health and Human Services’ seminal Heckler Report on health disparities found that minorities had a lower life expectancy and a higher death rate from heart disease and diabetes, among other things. Just what we need: another task force to ruminate about disparities.

It is well known that black Americans have persistently higher rates of hypertension compared to whites. Indeed, 75 percent of black people in the United States develop high blood pressure by the age 55 compared to 55 percent of white men and 40 percent of white women. To make matters worse, fewer black than white Americans have their blood pressure controlled. Additionally, black American adults are 60 percent more likely than non-Hispanic white adults to have diabetes as well as more complications, such as amputations and kidney failure.

Early in the COVID journey, clinicians found that hypertension and obesity were key predictors of COVID mortality. Not surprisingly, black patients hospitalized with COVID-19 were more likely to have high blood pressure and diabetes compared with all other racial and ethnic groups combined. And the obese hospitalized patients were more likely to die. Further, people with darker skin—63 percent of Hispanic people and 82 percent of black people have low vitamin D levels. And vitamin D may lessen the severity of COVID disease.

In one study, compared with other racial groups, black people were less likely to have been tested for COVID prior to being seen at the hospital. The researchers noted that the key advantage to earlier diagnosis is the decrease in community spread. The study fails to acknowledge that early diagnosis would lead to early treatment. Why? The party line is that there is no early treatment. Not true. Early treatment works.

Given the severity of the COVID illness in black Americans, one gets the feeling that withholding treatment is a familiar tune. In the disgraceful 40-year Tuskegee experiment, treatment was withheld from black men so scientists could learn the natural history of the disease. The control group continued to receive placebos, despite the fact that penicillin became the recommended treatment for syphilis several years into the experiment. Praise the Lord for randomized controlled studies.

Do Dr. Fauci and his pharma cronies care about black folks? (He didn’t seem to care about the AIDS patients). He exhorts about the need for controlled studies and dismisses vast clinical experience. But as Tom Frieden, former director of the CDC noted, “waiting for more data is often an implicit decision not to act, or to act on the basis of past practice rather than on the best available evidence.”

Nations with plenty of black and brown folks, such as Cuba, India, Algeria, and Costa Rica are achieving lower overall death rates with early treatment with hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug with an over 50-year safety record. Other countries are using ivermectin, a safe antiparasitic used to treat scabies. Perhaps because these drugs are inexpensive as compared to the new expensive potential wonder drugs and the cost of ICU care, poorer countries were eager to try something that worked, rather than wait for a piece of pie in the sky.

Repurposing of FDA-approved drugs that have been used safely on millions of patients is not new. Amazingly, a combination of an antibiotic (doxycycline), a diabetes drug (metformin), a treatment for intestinal worms (mebendazole), and the cholesterol-lowering statin, Lipitor was found to extend the survival of people with glioblastoma, a type of brain cancer! The authors of the innovative study noted that “it is well recognized that high-cost randomized controlled trials may not be an economically viable option for studying patent-expired off-label drugs. In some cases, randomized trials could also be considered as ethically controversial.” Money talks, helping patients walks.

While hand-wringing over the tragic COVID patient deaths, the “chosen ones” silence discussion about preventive and early treatment. Senate hearings on the subject were ignored, even mocked. There’s no need for early treatment with safe medications because the (experimental) vaccine has arrived. Meanwhile people continue to needlessly die.

Let’s not repeat Tuskegee. When there is a low risk and reasonable likelihood of helping, let the patient and doctor choose between doing nothing or actively treating. Positive clinical results and the morality of life and death matter more than crowing about scientific purity.

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Bio: Dr. Singleton is a board-certified anesthesiologist. She is the immediate past President of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS). She graduated from Stanford and earned her MD at UCSF Medical School.  Dr. Singleton completed 2 years of Surgery residency at UCSF, then her Anesthesia residency at Harvard’s Beth Israel Hospital. While still working in the operating room, she attended UC Berkeley Law School, focusing on constitutional law and administrative law.  She interned at the National Health Law Project and practiced insurance and health law. She teaches classes in the recognition of elder abuse and constitutional law for non-lawyers. She lives in Oakland, Ca.