Recycling

 I've seen a number of stories observing that some of the places with low vaccination rates have high rates of Covid cases, but I haven't seen any systematic examination of the relationship, so I did it myself.  I had a post last month about state differences in vaccination rates, so I reused those and got data on average daily rates of covid cases and deaths (as of July 11).*

 

It's a pretty strong relationship:  not all of the states with low vaccination rates have high covid rates, but none of the states with high vaccination rates have high covid rates.  

For death rates, there's also a strong relationship:

 

The current average in the United States ass a whole is about 200 deaths per day, which is a lot less than the peak, but over the course of a year would amount to 73,000 deaths, which is about as many as drug overdoses (70,000) and substantially more than suicide (47,000), motor vehicle accidents (38,000) or homicide (19,000).  A  regression of the log of death rates on vaccination rates suggested that if all states had vaccination rates similar to the current top states, death rates in the nation would be cut in half.

While I was at it, I thought about the pattern of state differences in vaccination rates.  As my previous post noted, they are strongly related to politics--states in which Biden got a larger share of the vote have higher vaccination rates.  I wondered if there were other things that made a difference.  One was "social capital," which could increase vaccination rates in several ways (more trust in medical authorities, more willingness to do something to help other people, more chance that friends or neighbors will help or encourage you to get vaccinated).  In a post from a few years ago, I used data on state-level social capital from a project sponsored by Senator Mike Lee.  Unfortunately, Senator Lee's website has been reorganized and I could no longer find details on how the estimates were compiled, but I remember thinking at the time that they seemed good.  So I reused those data, and regressed vaccination rates on the Biden share and state-level social capital.  The results:

                        estimate    SE

Intercept            38.1    (4.6)

Biden                1.12    (.09)

S Capital            5.7      (1.1)

Although Biden vote is a stronger predictor, social capital also helps to predict vaccination rates.  For example, Arkansas and South Dakota are almost exactly the same in terms of support for Biden (about 36%), but South Dakota (which ranks high in social capital) is about average in vaccination rates and Arkansas (which ranks low) is one of the lowest. 

*Ideally, I would have gotten updated data for vaccinations, but I didn't have time, and the pattern of state differences doesn't seem to be changing much.