At the Hotline we don’t like to toot our own horn (ok, we do), but our comprehensive study which grades the states on their handling of COVID was released today and is prominently highlighted in today’s Wall Street Journal and on FoxNews.com.
It also is featured in the prestigious National Bureau of Economic Research website.
We won’t get deep in the details here, but we examined three metrics: 1) health (death rate in each state from COVID adjusting for co-morbidities); 2) economy (unemployment and growth of output in each state); and 3) education (number of days schools remained open).
The table below shows the results. The main takeaway: Strict lockdowns of businesses were a catastrophic mistake and even worse was the shutting down of schools. States that locked down had no better health outcomes than states that remained mostly open.
Congrats to governors Cox of Utah, Ricketts of Nebraska, Phil Scott of Vermont, Noem of South Dakota, DeSantis of Florida for keeping their citizens and their economies healthy.
And if you live in New Jersey, New York, California, or Illinois…we’re sorry.
