While the financial website WalletHub has issued a report to the effect that New York state is doing very poorly in combating Covid, statistics released by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo reveal that the state actually ranks seventh from the bottom, compared with other states in terms of Covid positivity rates.
The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center said that as of April 15, Idaho led all states with a 22.8% positivity rate for the virus. The best result came from California, which had 1.5% positive tests.
Cuomo reported that 34.1% of New Yorkers age 18 and up have been fully vaccinated and 50.7% have had at least one vaccine dose. The testing positivity rate in New York fell to 2.76%, the lowest since Nov. 21.
The governor said that in New York, hospitalizations had dropped to 3,963 — the first time since Dec. 1 they had fallen below 4,000. The death toll in the state reached 41,347, with six new deaths reported.
WalletHub said that its analysis of data from the U.S. Census Bureau, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, Covid-19 Electronic Laboratory Reporting and epiforecasts.io. showed that overall New York ranked 47th in the nation in terms of Covid safety.
WalletHub relied on five key metrics in comparing what was happening in the various states and the District of Columbia: Vaccination rate; positive testing rate; hospitalization rate; death rate; and transmission rate. The material distributed by WalletHub did not include the raw data that was used in preparing the analysis.
Not all data was given equal weight, with the vaccination rate counting twice in compiling the outcomes and the death rate counting three times.
WalletHub found that Connecticut ranked 18th in terms of Covid safety, while the safest state was New Hampshire and the least safe was Georgia.
“At the moment, we have found a weak positive correlation between the vaccination rate ranking and the death rate ranking,” WalletHub analyst Jill Gonzalez said. “As the vaccination rate increases, the death rate decreases.
“It’s important to consider the fact that only around 23% of the population is vaccinated so far, but a much greater portion will become eligible for vaccination soon,” she continued. “In the future, we should expect a stronger correlation between the two variables as the vaccination rate increases.”
Gonzalez said that in addition to having the highest death rate in the nation in mid-April, Georgia ranked as the 7th lowest when it came to the share of the population age 16 and over that had received at least one dose of a vaccine. The Business Journal found that as of April 15, Georgia had reported a total of 3,894 Covid deaths for a death rate of approximately 366 per million population since the pandemic first hit.
