A new study ranking states’ handling of Covid-19 found Democratic states performed “poorly on every measure” in contrast to red states.
The Committee to Unleash Prosperity study compared the states’ handling in terms of mortality, economy and schooling during the pandemic, and found that New Jersey, New York and California—all blue states—ranked the worst in all three categories. Utah, Vermont and Nebraska led the categories.
“The one piece of good news in this study is that states which maximized the individual freedoms of business owners, consumers, workers and parents – and allowed their citizens to make their own risk assessments without government mandates – had the best performance,” the report said.
The three worst-ranked, along with Illinois, had “high age-adjusted death rates; they had high unemployment and significant GDP losses, and they kept their schools shut down longer than almost all other states,” the report said.
@WSJ reports a new @nberpubs study shows Utah as the #1 state for best COVID-19 performance outcomes for economy, education, and mortality. Read the full study here: https://t.co/89WWJFjVG0 #utpol @GovCox
— Utah Dept. of Health (@UtahDepOfHealth) April 11, 2022
Florida also held a high ranking on the list, holding an average mortality rate while having high economic activity, the study said. The state ranked 6th in the state pandemic performance following behind all Republican-led states Utah, Nebraska, Vermont, Montana and South Dakota. (RELATED: ‘We Need Our Kids To Breathe’: DeSantis Vows No Mask Mandates As Major US Cities Clamp Down While COVID-19 Cases Rise)
Nevada, New York, New Jersey and Washington D.C. ranked highest in mortality rates, while Hawaii, Vermont, Maine and Oregon ranked the best in handling COVID mortality.
The study found no correlation between travel, vocation and dining restrictions, the report says. The report also said school closures connected with the 13.8 million student lives lost in the 2019-20 school year.
“The study verifies other studies which have found that locking down businesses, stores, churches, schools, and restaurants had almost no impact on health outcomes across states,” the report determined. “States with strict lockdowns had virtually no better performance in COVID death rates than states that remained mostly open for business.”
Former Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo claimed in 2020 that Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was “playing politics” with the pandemic. The governor came under fire just a year later for his state’s undercounting of COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes.
The New York Department of Health (DOH) ordered that COVID-positive nursing home patients could not be turned away from facilities and changed its reporting measures to only count patients who physically died in the facility.
DeSantis signed an executive order in July 2021 banning mask mandates in schools and protecting the rights of parents to decide whether their child is masked in the classroom.
“In Florida, there will be no lockdowns, there will be no school closures, there will be no restrictions and no mandates in the state of Florida,” DeSantis said during his remarks.
Californians held a recall election in September for Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom over his strict lockdowns and COVID-19 restrictions.