How well did Idaho respond to COVID-19? New report card grades states’ outcomes
A new report card gives Idaho a grade of “B” for its response to the COVID-19 pandemic and its outcomes. That was good enough to rank Idaho No. 10 in the country.
The report card, from the government-sounding National Bureau of Economic Research, is from a group of free market proponents — Phil Kerpen of the “Committee to Unleash Prosperity,” Stephen Moore of The Heritage Foundation and Casey Mulligan of the University of Chicago.
In addition to economic outcomes, the report looks at in-person education and mortality outcomes to come up with overall rankings of the states.
“States learned from one another over time about what policies worked most and least effectively in terms of containing the virus while minimizing the negative effects of lockdown strategies on businesses and children,” according to the report’s introduction.
Utah comes out on top overall. Nebraska, Vermont, Montana, South Dakota, Florida, New Hampshire, Maine, Arkansas and Idaho round out the first 10.
At the bottom of the list: Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Nevada, Maryland, Illinois, California, New Mexico, New York, District of Columbia and New Jersey.
COVID “success” is complicated, and the report card has its limitations, relying on just a few data points. Vaccination rates, for example, are not accounted for, and the report card uses just a two-dimensional metric for education: in-person school, good; online-only, bad. It doesn’t look at actual education outcomes.
The goal of the authors seems to be to show that lockdowns and overly restrictive measures had a disproportionate negative effect on economies while not having an effect on health outcomes.
“The correlation between health and economy scores is essentially zero, which suggests that states that withdrew the most from economic activity did not significantly improve health by doing so,” according to the paper.
Among the report’s conclusions is “there is no apparent relationship between reduced economic activity during the pandemic and our composite mortality measure.”
But that’s not true across the board.
Some states show a pretty strong inverse correlation between economic outcomes and mortality. Montana, for example, ranked first for economic indicators but 40th in terms of mortality. South Dakota was second in economic terms but 44th in terms of mortality. Arizona kept its economy going, ranking sixth on the report card, but at what cost? Its mortality rate was dead last.
On the other end of the spectrum, Massachusetts’ economic performance ranked 46th, but its mortality rank was 15th. Similarly, Maryland’s economy was hit hard, ranked 38th, but that state kept its residents relatively healthy, with a mortality ranking of 10th.
While the report card is limited, it is useful to look at the states that seemed to hit a sweet spot, including Idaho.
The report card highlights three states that had combined scores well above the others and substantially above the average in all three categories: Utah, Nebraska and Vermont.
Utah ranked fourth in economy, fifth in education and eighth in mortality. Nebraska was third, sixth and 11th in those categories, and Vermont was 19th, 11th and second.
The report card also calls out Florida, which earned an “A” and ranked sixth overall. Florida had average mortality (28th) while maintaining a high level of economic activity (13th) and 96% open schools.
Idaho by the numbers
Based on the rankings, you could put Idaho in the same category as Florida.
As I’ve written before, Idaho’s economy did remarkably well compared with other states through the pandemic.
Low unemployment, personal income growth, booming tax revenue, a record state budget surplus, strong credit rating and continued strong economic growth have been highlights of Idaho’s economy.
The reasons were many. Some were natural, such as the types of industries we have in Idaho — agriculture, food manufacturing and construction — which all continued robustly during the pandemic and were declared essential services, exempt from stay-at-home orders early on.
Indeed, Idaho scores well on the report card’s economic metrics, ranking fifth in unemployment and sixth in GDP, for an overall ranking of fifth in economic performance.
But Idaho fell down in terms of mortality and education.
Idaho was ranked 26th in terms of mortality average, which took into account all-cause excess deaths during the pandemic and adjusted for prevalence of obesity and diabetes, two conditions strongly correlated with COVID-associated deaths.
Education rankings
For education, researchers used a single metric: the cumulative share of in-person instruction percentage for the complete 2020-2021 school year, with hybrid instruction weighted half.
Idaho left the decision to individual school districts to decide whether to have in-person, hybrid or online instruction.
On this point, the report takes a dim view of online education, simply equating it with state lockdown measures and correlating it with negative health outcomes.
“School closures may ultimately prove to be the most costly policy decision of the pandemic era in both economic and mortality terms,” according to the report authors.
So it ranks states based on just that one metric.
On this, Idaho ranked No. 20, with a cumulative in-person attendance rate of 70.6%.
Conclusions
The report card is probably more descriptive than prescriptive.
Could Idaho have kept its strong economic numbers and still improved its mortality score? Probably, with more widespread mask use and a higher vaccination rate. Without those data points, though, this report card can’t tell us that answer.
Could school districts have gone back into in-person teaching more quickly without lowering the mortality score? Possibly.
It will be important to look at those questions, as we very well may be entering another phase of COVID, with the BA.2 subvariant beginning to spread.
How we react to another wave will be important and should be informed by what worked and what didn’t so far.
While the report card is limited, its description of Idaho’s outcomes suggest that Idaho, for the most part, struck the right balance of keeping the economy going, maintaining overall health and keeping schools open.
BEHIND THE STORY
MOREWhat is this column all about?
This column shares the personal opinions of Idaho Statesman opinion editor Scott McIntosh on current issues in the Treasure Valley, in Idaho and nationally. It represents one person’s opinion and is intended to spur a conversation and solicit others’ opinions. It is intended to be part of an ongoing civil discussion with the ultimate goal of providing solutions to community problems and making this a better place to live, work and play.
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