As of March 10, 2023, the death rate from COVID-19 in the state of New York was 397 per 100,000 people. New York is one of the states with the highest number of COVID-19 cases.

Context

After observing many naive conversations about COVID-19, claiming that the pandemic can be blamed on just a few factors, I decided to create a data set, to map a number of different data points to every U.S. state (including D.C. and Puerto Rico).

Content

This data set contains basic COVID-19 information about each state, such as total population, total COVID-19 cases, cases per capita, COVID-19 deaths and death rate, Mask mandate start, and end dates, mask mandate duration (in days), and vaccination rates.

However, when evaluating a pandemic (specifically a respiratory virus) it would be wise to also explore the population density of each state, which is also included. For those interested, I also included political party affiliation for each state ("D" for Democrat, "R" for Republican, and "I" for Puerto Rico). Vaccination rates are split into 1-dose and 2-dose rates.

Also included is data ranking the Well-Being Index and Social Determinantes of Health Index for each state (2019). There are also several other columns that "rank" states, such as ranking total cases per state (ascending), total cases per capita per state (ascending), population density rank (ascending), and 2-dose vaccine rate rank (ascending). There are also columns that compare deviation between columns: case count rank vs population density rank (negative numbers indicate that a state has more COVID-19 cases, despite being lower in population density, while positive numbers indicate the opposite), as well as per-capita case count vs density.

Acknowledgements

Several Statista Sources: * COVID-19 Cases in the US * Population Density of US States * COVID-19 Cases in the US per-capita * COVID-19 Vaccination Rates by State

Other sources I'd like to acknowledge: * Ballotpedia * DC Policy Center * Sharecare Well-Being Index * USA Facts * World Population Overview

Inspiration

I would like to see if any new insights could be made about this pandemic, where states failed, or if these case numbers are 100% expected for each state.

How well have populist leaders responded to the COVID-19 pandemic? There is a growing literature dedicated to populism and health outcomes. However, the ongoing pandemic provides us with a unique opportunity to study whether populist leaders fared better or worse than their non-populist counterparts by using a much larger sample size. While there has been a fruitful debate over whether populism is responsible for worse health outcomes, much of the focus has centered around the overall effect of having populist parties in power, without testing for different explanatory mechanisms. We argue that populist leaders fuel mass political polarization, which increases the overall level of hostility among the population and reduces their willingness to comply with anti-COVID measures and, more generally, contribute to public good. We test this theory using the expert-coded V-Party Dataset which contains variables for the ideological characteristics for parties around the world, as well as weekly excess mortality from the World Mortality Dataset. In addition to the OLS regression analysis, we employ a causal mediation framework to account for the order of succession of populism and political polarization. Our empirical results corroborate our main hypothesis that populism fuels political polarization, which is, in turn, associated with higher excess mortality during the ongoing pandemic. Our results are robust to alternative model specifications.