With federal vaccine and immunization policy in turmoil, Nationhood Lab took a deep dive into the United States’ experience in the Covid-19 pandemic, revealing stark and consistent regional differences in adherence to public health advice, vaccination rates, and per capita deaths.
The results, published Sept. 29, show consistent spatial patterns for compliance with stay at home advice in the initial weeks of the crisis, per capital vaccine uptake in the middle of the the following summer, per capita deaths at the end of the summer, vaccination rates at the end of the public health emergency in early 2023 and, most tragically, the ultimate death count.
The Deep South, where compliance and vaccination rates were poor, lost 505 out of every 100,000 residents to Covid-19, or over a quarter of million lives. That was two and a half times the rate in the (densely populated) Left Coast (195 per 100,000) and five times the rate in Hawaii (part of Greater Polynesia) which, being an island, was able to largely seal itself off and provides a control sample for what might have been possible. The article predicts similar geographic disparities will occur in future pandemics and flare ups of previously contained infectious diseases as childhood vaccination rates plummet.
Read the full article at Nationhood Lab for details.
COLIN WOODARD is a New York Times bestselling author, historian and award-winning journalist. He is the author of seven books that have been translated into a dozen foreign languages and inspired an NBC television drama. He is currently Director of Nationhood Lab at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Affairs at Salve Regina University. As State and National Affairs Writer at Maine's Portland Press Herald, he won a 2012 George Polk Award and was a finalist for a 2016 Pulitzer Prize. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, The Economist, Smithsonian and dozens of other major publications.