Pandemic Deaths and Recovery
By Joseph Bulger
COVID-19 has been a deadly, world-changing disease that continues to kill and impact us to this day. As we head forward from the worst of it, different people in different areas seem to be recovering at varying speeds. While COVID-19 has contributed to a growing death count, how much did it effect that count in individual states. Some states got hit worse than others, or continue to have a high death rate partially due to lasting effects from the pandemic. What are those states, and how are they different from the states that adapted quickly.
Initially when looking at the yearly COVID-19 deaths by state, it is clear that bigger states and states with big cities suffered from the most deaths. California which has both, had 34,968 deaths from COVID in all of 2020. Similar highs can be seen with states like New York and Pennsylvania. When looking at the weekly data for many of these states, deaths per week were high towards the beginning and the end of the pandemic. I believe this to be from people adjusting to being in quarantine for the first time, and people traveling for holidays/school. California and Pennsylvania both jumped to over 1,000 deaths per week in the last 4 weeks of the year. California reached over 3,000 the last week of the year. From people traveling to visit family or leaving quarantine to party, caused an obvious jump in deaths. New York didn’t see as big of a bump in weekly deaths as the states like California. With travel to New York City being limited/cut off at that point in the pandemic, large gatherings were a lot less common.
While these, and other large states started off the pandemic the worst, more states death rate grew the following year. Most small-medium size states death rate grew the slowest. In the case of North Dakota, deaths per year even shrank from 1430 to 813. Small states were able to “avoid” COVID altogether, or mitigate the effects of it. The beginning of the year had the most deaths per week, and most states began to slowly decline into a plateau. This plateau generally lasted until the end of 2021. This helps demonstrate that despite having a large number of deaths, the pandemic gradually grew more and more “under control”. Travel during holiday times seemed to be the cause of another spike in deaths like seen in 2020. Other COVID variants were also being discovered, likely causing more deaths.
After another year with peak COVID deaths, 2022 has been the first step towards “normality”. Larger states tend to have benefited the most, with Florida shrinking from 38,655 deaths in 2021 to 16,716 deaths in 2022. Most states of this size shrank around this degree similar to California and Texas. Due to the COVID-19 vaccine being made available to the public at the end of 2020, effects were becoming noticeable. The middle of the year saw a large drop-off in deaths for most states. The smaller the states got, the less of a decrease tended to occur, as seen with Massachusetts staying around 5,00 deaths. Naturally, you would expect a drop off in deaths as the disease ran its course. Further research may be needed to look into the demographics of this state. If they have an older population, or are especially at risk to COVID. Most of these deaths were towards the beginning of the year, so part of the reason could be an effect like the large states in 2020.
Overall, COVID-19 still effects a large portion of this country, especially those that are at-risk. Despite coming far with vaccines, masks, and social distancing, there are still lasting effects on our society. Large states had the most deaths, but also tended recovered at a faster rate as seen by Florida and California. Medium sized states were very sporadic, with some having large increases or decreases in deaths depending on time and city size like Massachussestss. Large cities may have resulted in more strict protocol and quicker recovery as seen in New York. Small states like North Dakota had the least COVID numbers, and felt most of the effects during travel and flu seasons. Starting 2023, weekly deaths from COVID from January are lower than previous years. By studying patterns and effects from the past few years, we know how to react to keep the most people safe and healthy as possible.
