COVID-19: Red vs. Blue vs. Europe

I've observed a lot of angry debate about which country/state/political party has handled the COVID-19 crisis the best. As I read various articles online, I struggled to find anything that presented quantifiable and succinct evidence as opposed to partisan rhetoric. So, I did some online searches to understand this for myself. This article is to summarize for you what I found.

I organized data from publicly available sources into one table which I present below. For example, 0.065% of the people of the United Kingdom have perished from COVID-19, and their economy dropped 19.8%. In the USA, in the "purple" states, 0.064% of the citizens have perished from COVID-19 (about the same as the United Kingdom) but the GDP has dropped only 9.3%, much less than the 19.8% in the UK. Other comparisons can be made and I will allow the reader to make them on his/her own. I am sure the reader will have his/her own theories about what this data means, and that is fine with me; I just wanted to provide a clean dataset for people. The rest of the article explains how I pulled the data together. I provide no speculation about what caused these results.

How I determined Red vs. Blue vs. Purple States and European Countries

I went to Wikipedia, "Table of U.S. state party statistics as of November 2019". I pulled the data into a spreadsheet and designated a state as "blue" if the Republican Party had no control over the state house, state senate, or governorship. I designated as "red" if the Democratic Party has no control of the state house, state senate, or governorship. All others were designated as "purple". For European countries I picked the five largest Western European countries and added Sweden because of its well known practices related to COVID-19 (it didn't have a lockdown). I didn't include other smaller European countries (such as Denmark) because this article isn't about comparing the various smaller European countries, and I didn't want to go down that rabbit hole.

How I determined the percentage of population who died

I went to Worldometers for both country and state. I pulled the number who died and put it in my spreadsheet which already had party affiliation and population. I divided those who died by the population of the political unit to make percentages who died.

How I determined the economics

This was much more challenging than I expected.

You cannot compare unemployment data from the U.S. vs. Europe because European countries count as "employed" people who are employed but with reduced or no hours.

It is difficult to compare U.S. GDP results to those of Europe, because the U.S. displays its data on an annualized basis while other countries show quarterly results. This makes it so that if you pull up articles to compare, the results are confusing.

However, the Organization for economic and cooperation computes rates for both Europe and the U.S. on the same basis. (Here is a chart.) Nobody seems to be disputing the OECD's figures. For example, here is an article by CNN using this sort of metric for comparison. Using this data allows one to compare the USA to European countries.

Switching focus from countries to US states, I could only find U.S. state data on an annualized basis. To convert individual state data to make it comparable to the other OECD data, I took the U.S. state data and applied a ratio to it, to convert it from annual to quarterly. The ratio I applied was "9.0/31.4". (This ratio would be "1/4" or "9/36" to take an annual figure to a quarterly basis, but there are seasonal adjustments involved.) By multiplying this ratio against the annualized GDP per state, I produced a value that in the aggregate would produce the -9.0% quarterly, seasonally adjusted GDP that the OECD says the USA experienced. Next, I used the proportion of GDP of each state in 2020Q1 (download the spreadsheets from the link "Release Tables Only") to weight the changes that happened from Q1 to Q2 to produce a weighted average change for Red vs. Blue. vs. Purple states. Doing this enables us to see Q2 GDP changes by US state versus European country.

For US states, I obtained the following results:

How can you, the reader, do this?

I've given you all the links; you can duplicate this. If you would like my spreadsheet, contact me, I'll gladly share. Also, if you detect something wrong with my data, please let me know! I'll fix/update this article.

Why do I write these articles?

When I finish doing my day job, I read the news and think about what is going on. I observe a lot of heated political discussion. I am surprised at how hard it is to answer basic questions, so I search the web. Then, after I've found useful information, I think that I might as well share it on social media. I've done this with regards to COVID-19, wildfires, Joe Biden's longevity, and the flu.

What is my day job?

Most of my career I've been in management of insurance companies. Currently I am helping some insurance companies with some projects, and I am also building algorithms for FraudSpotters. (We highlight articles and write about fraud algorithms on our LinkedIn site here; feel free to follow.) These algorithms are very successful at detecting fraud rings who are trying to scam insurance companies. I believe we have invented something groundbreaking. If you think our algorithms can help you, please contact me, and I'll gladly run them for free on your data to prove the point.