Michigan (and Ontario) have extremely high numbers of the UK variant, and increasing cases of at least two other more dangerous variants.

It's not a level playing field right now, if the variant(s) spread to the remainder of the states before vaccination is complete you will see some serious increase in daily cases.

Oregon's governor has done a very good job. Our rates are in the bottom 5 last I checked.

Not perfect. In fact, not even close to perfect. And, I am generally NOT a fan of Kate Brown.

But, she does understand the marshmellow theory.

Is that because Oregon did a good job, or because Oregon doesn't have many people, and the people that it does have are spread out across a large state?

Oregon has less than half the population of Washington, and <1/12 of the population of California. Oregon is also actually quite a bit bigger than Washington, so less than half the population in a space that's 38% larger than Washington.

My vote is that it had less to do with the actions of the govt, and more to do with characteristics of the state and its population.

Oregon is #39 in the list of states by population density. So, bottom 5% may not be bad.

Sort of.

First. Washington went NUTS early on. We all saw that. And I think we reacted in a very prudent manner. COVID was rampant in Seattle in March 2020. I know lots who had it.

So we cracked down.

But, there is a lot of low density land in Oregon. (Which is also highly populated by reactionary rednecks.) So, compliance in the rural areas was about what you would find in Idaho, Montana, and similar. It was the crack downs in the populated areas that kept things from getting nuts.

Odd story, the first COVID case in Oregon was an employee at the school my kids attended. I know people who visited him in the hospital. Small world...

Neanderthals are a species of humans just different but were able to mix with homo sapiens and reproduce.....so using Neanderthals as a pejorative is technically Racist. Just sayin'

LWJ: "But, there is a lot of low density land in Oregon. (Which is also highly populated by reactionary rednecks.) So, compliance in the rural areas was about what you would find in Idaho, Montana, and similar. It was the crack downs in the populated areas that kept things from getting nuts."

I live near and grew up in a town full of those "reactionary rednecks" mentioned earlier..I consider them pretty good people. I get along with most of them them just fine. The non criminals, that is.

But maybe you're right...Antifa thugs know better than to attack small towns..

They "demonstrated" very peacefully down in K falls when they encountered armed citizens standing shoulder to shoulder in front of the main street storefronts. Not one window smashed, no fires, no frozen water bottles tossed.

My daughter lives in South Dakota...the only state that never locked down or required masks. Probably lots of "reactionary rednecks" there as well.

I can’t say for sure because here in Georgia which was one of the first states to reopen way back after the first wave of COVID in March/April we were all supposed to have died long before now according to CNN/MSNBC/NBC/CBS/ABS/PBS/NPR/NY Times/Washington Post and I am sure 10 others that I am missing or don’t even know exist. Yes the case counts have ebbed and flowed here as they have in most every other state, the data show since Jan 1 2021 cases have dropped off a cliff and thankfully have stayed that way despite our states lack luster vaccination rate. I think reasons why are multifaceted including that we did open back up in a limited capacity early on. People had an outlet of some sort, people by and large if given the correct information will make the decision that is best for them in a given situation, we may have reached a heard immunity sooner as a result of opening. I said this what seems like a very long time ago now in this COVID age, we did this all wrong. In a pandemic you isolate the sick people not the whole population, the whole country did not go on lock down for the Spanish flu.

Bingo! Especially loved your bit about people able to make their own decisions. The government should inform...give the right information. Sadly, not all politicians think that way.

One of the earliest problems is governments were misinforming.

CV19 is something most people would not even be aware about if it weren't for the news.
If not this virus, some other virus could get the same people in the same year.

Straight up, people do not think about the scale of how many can be injured or die do to a rare cause in a country of hundreds of millions. Our sense of scale of a problem gets blown when talking in absolutes for a country, compared to say, a village.

If you took the 2020 CV19 deaths and round up to 400,000, take the survival rate, and calculate the number of deaths per survivor into a number of villages per death you'd get a grasp on CV19.
Then look at the change of overall deathrate per village from pre CV19.
For the greater portion of villages. that difference would have to be zere, there wouldn't be enough village to go around.

Imagine as village elder:

Twenty villagers will die in the next three years from cancer or heart problems due to lack of timely diagnosis and treatment caused by panic induced actions over CV19.
These twenty deaths are in order to stave off a chance that one villager might die from CV19 in the next year.

As village elder, what would you do?
How does that play out?

I suspect what he was talking about had nothing to do with rioting, looting, etc..., and was more about folks saying "F that! You can't tell me what to do. I ain't wearin' no damn mask!"

Using the term "reactionary redneck" was certainly a bit caustic, and bound to irritate some folks, so I understand where you're coming from.

Rednecks, country folks, etc... in many cases are very polite, hospitable, generous folks. I also worked in a poor ethnic part of Tampa once. Many white folks would probably have been uncomfortable in the area. Most of the folks that came into the store where I worked were some of the nicest most polite folks of any of the stores where I ever worked.

But, I have no doubt that if you rub any of those folks the wrong way, you may be surprised by how they can change. And I'm not commenting/judging on if the change/reaction is right or not, just an observation.

i love how everyone just glossed over the actual data and has kept just spouting opinions like they mattered.

lol.

I was in Bend, Oregon last summer and very few people were wearing masks, even in a large grocery store. Then, in Coos Bay, I went into a casino and not one person was wearing a mask in a crowded room of slot machines. Yet Oregon has always been doing well. I'm not sure the Gov had anything to do with it, based on what I saw.

seeing how the OP is asking about comparisons between STATES and not COUNTRIES, your data is irrelevant to the thread, despite your OPINION that it matters.

Id trust a Neanderthal over a liberal dictator any day of the week.

as my post details, state by state is not really a very useful comparison in this case if you are interested in how effective lockdown and masking measures were. the USA didnt put travel bans in place and the country became a strange patchwork of different measures required in different places at different times, but everyone is free to travel between all of them, so the data is very mixed up.

if you want clear data showing the effects of masking and lockdowns, it exists, just not in the USA.

so, do you want know what the effects were/are, or do you just wanna complain about your state government? i thought we were interested in the former, i guess maybe you are interested in the later. because the data is very clear, widespread masking, high test rates, contact tracing, social distancing, and lockdown were very effective at slowing the spread of covid19.

Thank you for the link and the contextual information, I found it helpful.

It was a good post, kind of got buried in the "my opinion is fact" crowd's rant.

Hey, we've got feelings, just listen to my feelings.

Not sure how best to quantify "lockdown states" vs others but a lot of people want to make that a political thing so let's reinterpret "heavy lockdown state" as "blue state". There is solid data available on cases per state, so pretty easy to get the rankings of states by cases per 100k residents.

TL;DR of the 20 states hit hardest 14 (70%) are red, and of the 20 states who did the best 14 (70%) are blue.

ND
SD
RI
UT
TN
AZ
IA
OK
NE
WI
AR
SC
NJ
AL
KS
IN
MS
ID
DE
IL
GA
NV
MT
WY
FL
NY
TX
KY
MN
LA
MO
NM
MA
CT
CA
NC
OH
AK
MI
PA
CO
WV
VA
MD
NH
WA
ME
OR
VT
HI

Using solely that logic Tishabet, Turkmanistan's government "did the best" compared to any US state.
A direct problem with comparing cases per 100K is it might just show who was better at testing for positives per capita instead of who had a lesser percentage of CV19 cases per capita.
If a state banned testing, banned masks, banned mention of CV19, they'd top the charts for best CV19 response by data.

North Dakota and South Dakota is a far better comparison. One was locked down, one wasn't. No difference in outcome.