Is Colorado Really the Healthiest State?
Various outlets such as the The Denver Post, US News, and even the CDC regard Colorado as the healthiest state in the country. But is this truly the case or are we exaggerating a bit? Are there any “sleeper” states that have the edge against Colorado in regards to fewer deaths within a given disease? Well, let’s find out!
I will be looking into deaths caused by different diseases provided by the CDC and investigate if Colorado really is a “Mile High” above the rest. For simplicity purposes, this analysis will take place in 2021, the most recent and complete year.
But there is one thing to note within this data, since we are looking at deaths per state, population densities are going to be vastly different and therefore skew the rankings a bit. Since higher populations will experience a larger number of deaths we will need to find a metric to show clarity and true rankings.
To combat this, I will be calculating the mortality rate in that year by taking the number of deaths occurred and dividing it by the total population from that year. I will be bringing in census data that has populations of each state by year to help accomplish this formulated data point.
One of the deadliest diseases found within my dataset is Heart Disease, which has a staggering 683639 deaths across all 50 states in the year 2021. Colorado contributed around 8236 of those deaths. In order to get our rankings properly calibrated, let us start looking at mortality rates, the number of deaths due to a disease divided by the total population. The mortality rate of Heart Disease in Colorado, is .14% which is the 4rd lowest among the 50 states. Quite impressive! But it isn’t the lowest Mortality rate. The states that ranked a bit higher are Alaska, Utah and New York. With .136%, .132%, and .128% Mortality rates respectively. The state that has the highest mortality rate of Heart Disease is West Virginia with 0.30% which is nearly double Colorado’s mortality rate. So far so good, Colorado ranking one of the lowest in mortality rates in the deadliest of diseases.
Now let’s look at another disease that these sources claim that Colorado is ranked lowest on, Diabetes. The CDC ranks Colorado 5th lowest in terms of deaths caused by diabetes. Let’s double check with our data set to see if we can find a similar ranking in the mortality rates. So we will take the deaths of Diabetes in Colorado in 2021, 1219, and divide that by the total population at the time which was around 5.8 million. We can see the mortality rate of diabetes is 0.02% which ranked 15th among our list of states. We can see that diabetes runs really low within Colorado but not as low as the CDC claimed in another source. The state with the highest diabetes mortality rate is West Virginia again with a .07% so a little less than double Colorado's. West Virginia has accumulated around 4712 deaths while having a population of 1782959 people. But there are states that have a mortality rate of 0% and they are Vermont, Alaska, and Wyoming.
Colorado has shown some pretty impressive stats against the deadliest of diseases but does Colorado’s healthiness have anything to do with minimizing COVID deaths? In order to look at this, we have the data of COVID deaths per state from the same data set. We will calculate the mortality rate and compare it to the other states in the year 2021. I observed that Colorado’s COVID mortality rate is around .11 % in this data set and ranks 23rd against the other states mortality rates. An outside source provided by the US News suggests that COVID deaths in Colorado rank around 38th. So we see a small disconnect from Colorado’s healthy track record. This makes sense to see this disconnect because COVID isn’t the type of disease that is preventable by exercise and healthy lifestyles. Yes, it will definitely reduce the severity of COVID but the best counter against this specific disease is getting the right immune defense through a vaccine.
We have very good evidence that Colorado has a healthy style of living and that is translated to low mortality rates on the deadliest of diseases like Heart Disease and Diabetes. The altitude could be a main cause of this increased importance of health because this forces our bodies to passively work harder to bring in air. Colorado also has a good amount of outdoor activities so we are always staying active and entertained. We can also look at Social Determinants of Health, which measures specific conditions like economic stability, education, health care access, social and community roles and neighborhoods to determine an appropriate level of health. All these different social and cultural factors can definitely play a role in Colorado’s health. Is Colorado necessarily the healthiest state in the country? Not quite but still very healthy!
