Elections 2024 ... Risk averse Democrats vs. risk tolerant Republicans ... Part 2 (Age groups and vaccinations)

Last update: Wednesday 6/8/22 

This is the second of two blog notes that position Florida's Governor Ron DeSantis as a prototype for GOP candidates in 2024 who might run on platforms that oppose COVID mandates. Part 1 examined the rationale that Governor DeSantis -- an ambitious, highly educated, risk tolerant, potential 2024 candidate -- seemed to employ in his contrarian management of the pandemic in Florida for over two years. This second part examines some of the CDC's COVID statistics by which DeSantis and other GOP candidates might be judged when presenting their cases to an electorate that was still divided into risk tolerant vs. risk averse voters ... assuming that the pandemic is still raging in 2024.

The data in the first two two tables and chart of this blog note are consistent with a loathsome "null" hypothesis, namely: there isn't much difference between the patterns of life and death outcomes in the bluest of blue states, California and New York, that made considerable efforts to conform to the CDC's guidance vs. the life and death outcomes in the reddest of red states. Florida and Texas, that offered considerable resistance to that guidance. However this surface similarity fades as the discussion probes additional data.

COVID deaths for age groups in blue vs. red states

As shown in Table 1 that was included in Part 1 of this note, over 70 percent of the COVID deaths in the entire country were 65 and over. Given the strength of this national pattern, the editor of this blog expected it to hold in each of the four most populous states. Accordingly, when he searched the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) repository for tables that contained this data on 5/31/22, he submitted four words to the NCHS search engine: covid, death, age, and state. He also wanted to see if the death rates increased among higher and higher age groups above 65. 

The dataset that most closely matched his requirements was the Provisional COVID-19 Deaths by Sex and Age, whose file had been updated on 5/25/22. He downloaded the file to his Mac, then wrote a few "tidyverse" scripts in the R language to produce the tables that appear below. Table 2A shows the distribution of COVID deaths by age groups in the nation's four most populous states: California, Texas, Florida, and New York, plus the age distribution in the entire United States.

Table 2A. COVID Deaths for Age_Groups by State

Age_Group	California	Florida	New York	Texas	U.S.
Under 1 year	23	16	n/a	39	291
1-4 years	13	11	n/a	19	140
5-14 years	23	26	n/a	48	336
15-24 years	301	214	69	368	2,663
25-34 years	1,365	851	247	1,685	11,233
35-44 years	3,227	2,127	586	4,110	27,806
45-54 years	7,645	4,826	1,637	8,955	66,774
55-64 years	15,861	10,349	4,283	16,851	147,381
65-74 years	21,509	15,849	7,331	23,420	230,573
75-84 years	22,402	18,821	9,555	22,306	258,676
85+ years	23,033	17,272	12,648	17,468	257,052
All Ages	95,402	70,362	36,377	95,269	1,002,925

Source: Provisional COVID-19 Deaths by Sex and Age

Comments about Table 2A
The columns in this table show same information for each state, i.e., the number of people in the state in each age group who died from COVID.

• As expected, a very small minority of COVID deaths were suffered by the youngest age groups from birth to 24 years old.
  
  
• Also as expected, a super majority of COVID deaths in all four states were concentrated among the age groups 65 and older. COVID. COVID also kills those afflicted with significant pre-existing health conditions, like diabetes, obesity, and immunocompromised systems.
  
  Indeed, the high concentration of COVID deaths in the oldest age groups guarantees that most, but not all of the people with widespread health conditions -- like diabetes, and obesity -- who died from COVID were probably members of the oldest age groups.
  
  
• Note that the missing values ("n/a" = "not available") for deaths in New York were missing in the files the editor downloaded from the CDC. Given that deaths in these youngest age groups were very small for each of the other three states, the unknown values for New York were also likely to be very small.

Table 2B. % Deaths in Age_Groups by State

Age_Group	California	Florida	New York	Texas	U.S.
Under 1 year	0.02	0.02	n/a	0.04	0.03
1-4 years	0.01	0.02	n/a	0.02	0.01
5-14 years	0.02	0.04	n/a	0.05	0.03
15-24 years	0.32	0.30	0.19	0.39	0.27
25-34 years	1.43	1.21	0.68	1.77	1.12
35-44 years	3.38	3.02	1.61	4.31	2.77
45-54 years	8.01	6.86	4.50	9.40	6.66
55-64 years	16.63	14.71	11.78	17.69	14.70
65-74 years	22.55	22.52	20.16	24.58	22.99
75-84 years	23.48	26.75	26.28	23.41	25.79
85+ years	24.14	24.55	34.79	18.34	25.63

Source: Provisional COVID-19 Deaths by Sex and Age

Comments about Table 2B

The columns in this table show the percentage of people in the state in each age group who died from COVID. Percentages make the high concentration of COVID deaths in the oldest age groups in each state more explicit:

• The age group percentages were more or less the same for all states and the U.S. as a whole.
  
• Over 70 percent of COVID deaths in each state were 65 and older.
  
• For each age group, the percentage of COVID deaths were about the same in all four state. Given that persons in the oldest age groups were the most vulnerable to the virus, one would have expected that red state percentages in the oldest groups would have been higher than the age group percentages for nation as a whole (last column) and much higher than the percentages in the bluest blue states.

The unexpected similarity in the patterns of the death rates for the age groups will now be shoved aside by the far greater disparity in the deaths per hundred thousand population found in Table 2C (below).

Table 2C. Deaths per 100,000 Total Population by State

	California	Florida	New York	Texas	U.S.
Deaths	95,402	70,362	36,377	95,269	1,002,925
Total Population	39,237836	21,781,128	19,835,913	29,527,941	331,893,745
Deaths Per 100K	243	323.04	183	322.64	302

Comments about Table 2C

Tables 2A and 2B showed that COVID deaths in all four states and the U.S. followed the same patterns: very few deaths in the youngest age groups and the overwhelming majority of deaths occurred in the oldest age groups. So the difference in deaths per 100,000 population displayed in the bottom row of TableC is surprising. 

• The oldest residents of the red states suffered far higher deaths per hundred thousand than the oldest residents in the blue states
  
  
• But the the biggest and most welcome surprise was that New York, the state that quickly became the worldwide epicenter of the pandemic in early 2020, had the lowest death rate all four states and by a very wide margin, i.e., 183 deaths per hundred thousand. Florida's population is about 10 percent larger than New York's, but its death rate (323) was 75 percent higher than New York's (183)
  
  
• Note: The death rates for Florida and Texas are displayed with one decimal place instead of being rounded to the nearest integer in order to assure readers that the rates were very close, 323.04 and 322.64, by coincidence; rather than having the same high rounded value of 322 as the result of a typographical error .... :-(

Table 2D (below) focuses on death rates among the oldest, most vulnerable residents of these states.

Table 2D. Deaths per 100,000 in Ages 65+ by State

	California	Florida	New York	Texas	United States
TotDeaths65plus	66,944	51,942	29,534	63,194	74,6301
TotPop65plus	5,644,497	4,347,912	3,221,702	3,593,369	52,362,817
DeathsPer100K65plus	1,186	1,195	917	1,759	1,425

Source: Population of older age groups among the four states and U.S. obtained from U.S. Census Bureau's Table NST_EST2021_POP 

Comments about Table 2D

Table 2D is the bottom line, what this entire pandemic has been all about. Table 2C (above) COVID determined that deaths per hundred thousand for a state's entire population measured in the low hundreds. Table 2D measures deaths per hundred thousand for its oldest, most vulnerable population in the low thousands. The death rate for the oldest residents of a state was ten times as high as the death rate for its entire population. Why? Because the vast majority of the people that COVID killed were age 65 and older, as was shown in Table 2B (above). To be more specific:

• New York had the lowest death rate by a substantial margin. Most of this difference was due to the high commitment New Yorkers made to mitigations and vaccinations.
  
  It should be noted that Table C shows that New York had a much smaller population of seniors (3,221,702) than Florida (4,347,912). Of course, rates are supposed to take size differences into account, but the costs per customer of labor intensive efforts, like health care, usually don't scale very well when differences in client bases are measured in the millions.
  
  
• This note has identified surprising results from time to time, but the biggest surprise to the editor of this blog was finding that Florida, the reddest of the red states, protected its oldest residents about as well as California, a bluest of blue. Their death rates for residents 65 and over were about the same, Florida at 1,195 deaths per 100,000 and California slightly lower at 1,186 per hundred thousand
  
  Of course the same caveats noted for New York must be made for California, but in the opposite direction. California's senior population (5,644,497.) is about 1.3 million larger than Florida's (4,347,912), so the cost of rendering this care was probably much higher per resident than similar services rendered by Florida to its residents.
  
  
• Texas, the "other" red state, had a death rate for its senior residents (1,759 per hundred thousand) that was almost twice as high as New York's (917 per hundred thousand)

Table 3CDC. Fully Vaccinated % of Age Groups by State

	Vax_5+	Pop_5+	Vax_65+	Pop_65+	Percent Vax_5+	Percent Vax_65+
California	28,549,016	39,512,223	5,298,788	5,838,115	72.3	90.8
Florida	14,413,641	21,477,737	4,106,078	4,497,337	67.1	91.3
New York	14,995,369	19,453,561	3,042,907	3,296,146	77.1	92.3
Texas	17,866,037	28,995,881	3,268,777	3,734,229	61.6	87.5

Comments about Table 3CDC
Until recently, vaccines were our only powerful tools for limiting deaths inflicted by the coronavirus. Given that the vast majority of COVID deaths were persons aged 65 or older, the editor of this blog expected this final table to be a no surprise coda to Table 2D's implication that states that ensured that their oldest residents were highly vaccinated would be the same states who had low deaths per hundred thousand. 

This is the second version or Table 3 that the editor of this  blog has produced. The first version included data from the dashboards of the four states, data that was inconsistent with CDC data. This version is called "Table 3CDC" to signify that all of its data came from a dataset in the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) repository.  

This very large dataset, called COVID-19 Vaccinations in the United States, County, contained vaccination data for all age groups, including ages 65 and over. But the data was stored by county for all U.S. counties, not by state. So the  editor concocted a few more "tidyverse" R scripts to aggregate the county data up to the state level for the four states discussed in this blog note. 

• The first column shows the number of residents 5 years of age and older in each state who were fully vaccinated. 
• The second column shows the the total number of  residents 5 years of age and older in each state 
• The third column shows the number of residents 65 years of age and older in each state who were fully vaccinated.
• The fourth column shows the the total number of residents 65 years of age and older in each state 

The data in the first four columns were used to compute the percentages in the last two columns. 

• The fifth column shows the percentage of all residents 5 years of age and older who were fully vaccinated
• The fifth column shows the percentage of all residents 65 years of age and older who were fully vaccinated

As the reader can see, the data in this table, confirms our expectation that lower COVID deaths rates per 100,000 in Table 2D would be associated with higher vaccination rates  

• New York, the state with the lowest number of deaths per 100,000 in Table 2D -- 917 -- had the highest percentage of vaccinated older residents -- 92.3 percent.
• Texas, the state with the highest number of deaths per 100,000 in Table 2D -- 1,759 -- had the lowest percentage of vaccinated older residents -- 87.5 percent.

Table 3CDC does contain a couple of entries that, on first glance, are surprising.

• Consider the vaccination rate of the oldest residents of Texas, 87.5 percent. This high vaccination rate is unexpected given the high number of deaths per 100,000 value of 1,759 in Texas, a value that Table 2D shows is much higher than the national average of 1,425 deaths per 100,000.
  
  But if the oldest residents in a state are embedded in a community with low overall vaccination rates, they would be more vulnerable. The 5+ and older vaccination rate in Texas, 61.6 percent, is by far the lowest in Table 3CDC. So it's plausible that this low level of "background immunity" made the oldest residents of the state more vulnerable to severe infection and death.
  
  
• The high vaccination rate of oldest residents, 91.3 percent, for Florida presents much smaller anomaly because this value is only a tad higher than the 90.8 percent value for California. Nevertheless, this is surprising because Table 2D showed that California's death rate of 1,186 per 100,000 for oldest residents was a tad bit lower than Florida's value of 1,195.  Once again Table 3CDC shows that Florida's level of background immunity, 67.1 percent, was lower than California's 72.3 percent, a difference that undermined the protection of Florida's slightly higher vaccination rate for its oldest residents. 

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Links to related notes on this blog:  

• "Elections 2024... Risk averse Democrats vs. risk tolerant Republicans ... Part 1 (Governor DeSantis)", Last update: 5/31/22