Study Ranks The States' Responses To Covid, And Florida Comes Out On Top While New York And California Fail Miserably
Reflecting back on how various states handled the coronavirus pandemic, it simply takes a little common sense to see that shutting down businesses and keeping kids out of school was never a good idea.
We may know this to be true just by using reason and logic, but there's a recent study that dove deeper into the coronavirus pandemic and ranked how each state performed. This study was published by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity and the National Bureau of Economic Research. Not only was each state ranked alongside each other, but they were each given a report card grade on their efforts.
Florida Ranked at the Top, and New York and California Performed Miserably
Not surprisingly, Florida, Utah, Nebraska, and Vermont all came out on top because of their efforts to either keep businesses open or re-open them much sooner than other states did. Florida was given the report card grade of A, as was Georgia, Tennessee, Wyoming, and Oklahoma.
Researchers graded each state based on the number of deaths, the impact on education and children, and the growth of the economy. Naturally, the states that had the most severe lockdowns were ranked the lowest on the list. New York was graded an F, as was Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Illinois.
“They had high age-adjusted death rates, they had high unemployment and significant GDP losses, and they kept their schools shut down much longer than almost all other states,” the study read.
“Shutting down their economies and schools was by far the biggest mistake governors and state officials made during COVID, particularly in blue states,” Stephen Moore, one of the study’s authors and co-founder of the Committee To Unleash Prosperity, added.
When judging for the least impact on education, New York ranked 33rd and Florida ranked third. The states that had strict lockdowns and shut down the most businesses saw no difference in death rates than the states that remained fairly open. For example, Florida ranked 28th in mortality and California came in 27th, despite having the harshest lockdowns. Most of the states that had arbitrary shutdowns "have still not fully recovered the jobs lost in the early months of COVID.”