State-by-State Vulnerability Guide to Covid-19
Estimating how many people have been neither vaccinated nor infected gives a rough view of which states have the most to fear from another wave of the virus. Hawaii and Ohio are at the top of the list.
Anti-vaccine protesters in Ohio, where virus risk remains among the highest in the U.S.
Photographer: Stephen Zenner/AFP
As the summer began, a wide swath of states from the Northwest to the Southeast confronted the arrival of Covid-19’s Delta wave with, by my rough estimate, 35% or more of their residents fully vulnerable to the disease — that is, neither previously infected with nor vaccinated against it.
Sure enough, the darker-blue states on the map tended to have a tougher time of it this summer than the lighter ones, starting with Missouri, then spreading to the south and east and more recently the Mountain West and Appalachia. There were lots of other factors at work besides the vulnerabilities depicted on the map — state and local public health policies, behavior patterns, weather, bad luck. But the vulnerability almost certainly played a role. When I ran a regression analysis on the vulnerability percentages and the Covid-19 deaths per 100,000 residents since June 20 for all the states, the variation in vulnerability explained 16% of the variation in deaths, with only a 3.5% probability that the relationship was pure chance.