Cal State Online Fall 2020

[Merlin]

There's no correlation between states that shut down early and hard vs. ones that stayed open in the % of deaths; some like NY have TONS of deaths (148/100k), while CA doesn't even though they had a similar reaction to things (9/100k).

Technically, there has been research in this area and there is a correlation. Potentially several.

The biggest factor comes down to timing on the lockdown. Another factor is population density. California locked down a week before New York, and San Francisco locked down a few days before the rest of California. That fact alone is a huge cause for a reduction in death counts because with fewer people acting as potential carriers, the spread of the virus was curtailed. Waiting a week meant that the virus was able to spread further and faster and by the time people locked down, it was already in a lot of homes.

Another factor is population density. NYC is the city with the highest population density in the US, followed closely by San Francisco. Because of how closely packed together people are in NYC, the transmission rate is much higher. This is particularly important because of the delay in lockdown relative to San Francisco. Had San Francisco waited to lock down until New York, it is likely the ratio of infections and deaths per capita would be much closer.

Another factor is the use of public transportation, where NYC also leads other cities. Since many (most?) people in NYC don't even own a vehicle, the use of public transportation is also likely to have accelerated their infection rate and lead to higher death rates.

Los Angeles locked down a few days after San Francisco, but doesn't have the same population density or public transportation usage as either NYC or SF. However, they do have a higher overall population (just more spread out) than SF. So they got hit harder in total due to the higher number of people in LA county, but the overall infection rate is still lower overall due to the lockdown.

Some like Arkansas never shut down, while Idaho did, and they have the same % of deaths (5/100k).

You can probably attribute that to lower population density and less reliance on public transportation. But I don't know the details about those places. I have read the studies comparing NYC to SF though.