U.S. states with the lowest vaccination rates are recording many more deaths from COVID-19 than their highly vaccinated peers.
A DailyMail.com analysis finds that 10 states – Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Dakota, Tennessee, West Virginia and Wyoming – with the lowest vaccination rates accounted for 73.9 deaths per 100,000 residents, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
By comparison, the 10 states with the highest vaccination rates – Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington – recorded 18.9 deaths per 100,000 residents.
That means Americans living in the least vaccinated states are dying at a rate nearly four times as high as those in the most vaccinated states.
It comes as data shows three states in the South – Alabama, Georgia and Texas – are responsible for one-third of the more than 10,000 deaths in the nation last week.
Experts say that fatalities are a lagging indicator and often don’t start to decline until three or four weeks after cases and hospitalizations do, which means that deaths are expected to fall soon.
The ten states with the highest vaccination rates are recording only a quarter as many deaths per 100,000 as the states with the ten lowest vaccination rates. The average death rate per 100,000 residents for the least vaccinated states is 73.9, while it is only 17.8 for the most vaccinated
Unvaccinated Americans have borne the brunt of the COVID-19 pandemic since the Delta variant-fueled surge began in early summer.
Nearly all Covid deaths and hospitalizations in the U.S. are among unvaccinated people, despite this group making up less than 30 percent of the adult population.
States with lower vaccination rates have also suffered from a greater spread of the virus, and dwindling hospital resources to deal with surges of cases.
All of the ten states with the lowest vaccination rates in America are either in the South or Great Plains regions of the nation.
On the other hand, eight of the ten states with the highest vaccination rates are in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic regions of the U.S.
These massive geographical differences exacerbate virus spread in some areas, because unvaccinated people living near other unvaccinated people are more likely to contract the virus than an unvaccinated person in a largely vaccinated community.
It also presents issues when further medical care is necessary because unvaccinated people in largely vaccinated communities are likely to live in an area with more available hospital resources.
These issues compound, creating a large gap in the number of deaths from the virus depending on what part of the country a person lives in.
Alabama, which among the states with the lowest vaccination rates with only 42 percent of residents being fully vaccinated, is recording more deaths per 100,000 residents than any state in America.
More than 15 out of every 100,000 Alabamans died from the virus in the past seven days, CDC data show.
The state’s death rate is nearly 50 percent higher than any other state, with only West Virginia – also among the least vaccinated states – coming in second with 10.4 out of 100,000 residents dying last week.
No other state recorded more than ten out of every 100,000 residents dying over the past seven days.
Alabama, which recorded 742 deaths last week, joins Texas and Georgia as the states accounting for a large share of nation’s current Covid crisis – accounting for 3,500 of the 14,000 deaths recorded in the U.S. over the past week.
Georgia, also among the least vaccinated states with 44 percent of residents being fully vaccinated, recorded 872 deaths over the past seven days – or 8.2 per every 100,000 residents.
Texas has the dubious honor of leading the nation in Covid deaths last week, recording 1,931 – or 6.7 of every 100,000.
The three states combine for just over 3,500 deaths between them, out of around 10,000 recorded by the nations as a whole.
Deaths have been rising recently, increasing 25 percent from around 1,500 deaths per day to 2,000 per day over the past two weeks.
However, cases are finally dropping as it seems the summer Covid wave has come to an end.
Because deaths lag behind cases by a few weeks, experts predict that deaths will soon begin to drop as well.
