The Relationship (or lack thereof) Between a State’s Overall Health Ranking and Their COVID-19 Fatality Rate

by Clive Riddle, July 17, 2020

Given that co-morbidities have such an impact on COVID-19 fatalities, we thought it would be interesting to compare overall state health rankings that take co-morbidities into consideration, with COVID-19 fatality rates by state

We took the most recent results from America’s Health Rankings, their 30^th annual report released in December, which provides a “comprehensive assessment of the nation’s health and on a state-by-state basis. The report includes 35 core measures of health that are used to rank states.” Would states with healthier lifestyles and lower incidence of co-morbidities translate into lower COVID-19 fatality rates? For that matter, would healthier lifestyles translate to lower case rates under the assumption those practicing healthier lifestyles might also practice more social distancing, mask-wearing and hand-washing?

We exported Johns Hopkins COVID-19 data through July 17^th from the Kaiser Family Foundation State Health Facts webpage on Confirmed COVID-19 Cases and Deaths, and indicated rankings for COVID-19 fatality rates (Deaths per 1,000 / Cases per 1,000.) We also indicated the rank for Cases per 1,000 population.

The exercise unfortunately doesn’t indicate a widespread relationship. There are certain states whose rankings are similar (Utah and Hawaii in the Top 10 healthy states,) Actually, there appears to be a closer relationship in healthy state rankings and Cases/1,000 than with Fatality rates, although it is still not much of a relationship.

There are obviously more relevant factors at work here, than the overall state of a state populations’ health. But here is the state-by-state comparison of rankings: