In response to the letter “Death marches on” by William McCarthy, published Sept. 24.
In his Sept. 24, 2020, letter, William McCarthy stated that the best way to compare state-to-state response to the COVID-19 pandemic is to compare the deaths per million population. I agree. Unfortunately, William very quickly proceeded to cherry pick his statistics from two conveniently selected states to create the faulty argument that red states are deadlier than blue states and, therefore, all Trump’s fault. Unfortunately for William, the exact opposite happens to be true. The honest way to compare the states is to simply list the deaths per million from high to low.
No. 1 – New Jersey (D) – 1,824
No. 2 – New York (D) – 1,706
No. 3 – Massachusetts (R) – 1,356
No. 4 – Connecticut (D) – 1,261
No. 5 -Louisiana (D) – 1,163
No. 6 – Rhode Island (D) – 1,040
No. 7 – Mississippi (R) – 964
No. 8 – District of Columbia
(D) -880
No. 9 – Arizona (R) – 759
No. 10 – Michigan (D) – 702
Of the top 10 deadliest states, seven are blue states (Nos. 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8 &10) and three are red states (Nos. 3, 7 & 9)
As of Sept. 24, we had 207,515 total U.S. deaths attributed to COVID-19. A tragic statistic that William chose to ignore is that New York had 33,193 deaths and New Jersey had 16,213 deaths, totaling 49,406 deaths. Their combined population is 28,335,751 or 8.6 percent of the U.S. population, yet these two blue states contributed 23.8%, or almost one quarter of the total U.S. deaths.
Once you unspin William’s cherry picking of the statistics, it is extremely evident that the blue state policies of New York and New Jersey proved to be by far the deadliest in this pandemic.
Lawrence Weisdorn