Two ways to look at how your state handled the pandemic: raw data, and data adjusted for state age and health status

How did your state handle the pandemic? These maps from The Lancet, a British medical journal, tell the story. The unadjusted rates on the left are from simple data: How many coronavirus infections and how many Covid-19 deaths were there, per 100,000 residents? The standardized rates take into account age and "comorbidities," other medical conditions that may lead to infection or death.

To illustrate the standardization, take a look at Kentucky, a state with relatively poor health status. Its infection and death rates were worse than the national average, but when adjusted for age and the high level of comorbidities in the population, both rates were better than the national average.

The maps accompany an article credited to a long list of researchers, led by Thomas Bollyky of the Council on Foreign Relations and Emma Castro of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. They write, "States' struggles in the Covid-19 pandemic were not inevitable. The nearly four-fold differences that existed across states in Covid-19 death rates, even when standardized for factors such as age and comorbidities, suggest that lower death rates were achievable. The states with the lowest standardised Covid-19 death rates—Hawaii, New Hampshire, Maine, Vermont, and Maryland—are not confined to a single geographical region, nor did they all have governors from the same political party. The same is true for the states and territories with the highest standardized death rates—Arizona; Washington, D.C.; New Mexico; Mississippi; and Colorado."

But politics did play a role, the researchers wrote: "Declining economic conditions among lower-income Americans without a university degree have also weakened bonds of interpersonal trust—civic organisations, family bonds, and unions. Our results suggest interpersonal trust (i.e., trust in others) has played an outsized role in the Covid-19 pandemic, as it has in other epidemics where scientific uncertainties are great and public confidence is easily undermined. Having greater interpersonal trust motivates individuals to protect others in the community and reduces their fear of being misled and exploited by their peers. States with a higher percentage of people who voted for the 2020 Republican presidential candidate are associated with lower interpersonal trust in our study results. Trust has long been partisan in the USA, with citizens reporting less trust in government when the president comes from a different party than their own."