Ignorant or Pragmatic - a covid-19 data analysis

I read in news that there were 8 or 9 states that had not had state wide shelter-in-place order, and in all those reports it was also mentioned that these states all have Republican governors. The most recent tally by CNN is that there are still 7 states remain to be so.

Are those seven governors ignorant or what? I am curious about this and went ahead to perform a data analysis to compare these 7 states to the top 8 states that have most coronavirus infections and death. Here is what I find

table 1

data source: covid-19 data https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/; population, area, population density  - https://www.wikipedia.org/

The 7 states singled out by CNN account for 4.1% of US population, 1.36% total US covid-19 infection, 0.52% of US total covid-19 death.

In contrast, the top 8 states, most of them have Democratic governors, which account for 35.6% US population, 69.04% of total US covid-19 infections, 76.2% of total US covid-19 death.

Simple math shows that the top 8 states, which all have state-wide shelter-in-place, did much worse than the 7 states that do not have state wide shelter-in-place, based on population average. These top 8 states have 5.9 times more infections, 17 times more death!! (On absolute number the disparity is much larger 50 time in infection, 147 times in death.)

What do these comparisons mean?

Shelter-in-place not working? No. Data showed that at national level and state level, shelter-in-place and social distancing work.

Are these 8 states' governors or state governments incompetent? I could not tell by these numbers for sure. There are so many factors that determine the infection rate and death rate.

Epidemiology tells us that the spread of  virus (infection rate) is directly related to the people movement, and population density. In addition to these two factors, death rate is also related the age distribution of local populations. So in general, demographics and people movement are the dominant factors for the spread of virus infections and related death.

Let us look at the top 8 states, all of them have much higher population density, ~ 10x on average, than the 7 no-state-wide-shelter-in-place states; all of them have at least one the following: 1) major hubs for domestic or international air travel, 2) tourism hot spots, 3) metropolitan area with very high population density, not only higher than national average, but also much higher than their individual state average, see table 1 above, and table 2 below.

table 2

State wide shelter in place and social distancing works in the top 8 most infected states and other states that have such order, it flattens the curves, reduces the number death when compared to projected scenarios without such measures.

For those 7 states that do not have state wide shelter-in-place order, it may make sense. Shelter-in-place is a joke if one has NO neighbors in all directions for miles, such is the frequent cases in many of these 7 states. For them social distancing could be good enough for most areas in their states, as long as their state population centers have shelter-in-place order.

Data tells me that the seven state governors are cognizant of their unique situations, large ares, sparsely populated, no state wide shelter-in-place is more based on pragmatism than ideology.

It also tells me that governors of the 8 most infected states may not be incompetent, they do what they have to do to flatten the curves for a much more challenging environment. It is ridiculous when they ask  everyone do the same as they do, or when they refuse to accept lock-down for their highly infected major metropolitan areas or state, such as NYC or tri-state CT-NY-NJ.

No need for one-size-fits-all policy, be pragmatic!

No politicizing covid-19 crises, just solving problems.