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There's really three separate pieces to this issue that I think everyone needs to be aware of. The first is my main point in the video: That there's higher rates of obesity, heart disease, etc. in The South, which makes people more likely to succumb to COVID-19. 1/x https://twitter.com/IanHoppe/status/1247917954089529345
You can see some data here put together by the @KFF week before last. Important stuff: 2/x https://www.kff.org/global-health-policy/issue-brief/how-many-adults-are-at-risk-of-serious-illness-if-infected-with-coronavirus/
I also cite the numbers for Washington State DOH and their badass dashboard. That hasn't changed much in the last few days. The demographic I mentioned, 40-59, is still at 7%: https://www.doh.wa.gov/emergencies/coronavirus
I compared those numbers to the numbers over at the Louisiana DOH's site, which is also pretty easy to use. Today, that number is at 17% of deaths are adults between the ages of 40 and 59. Trending downward for the moment, but still more than twice what we've seen elsewhere.
HOWEVER, as my colleague @SarahWhitesk published on this morning, we may not have any idea what the ACTUAL number of deaths attributable to this virus is. So these rates, here and elsewhere, may be undercounted from the jump. Go read this: https://www.al.com/news/2020/04/coronavirus-deaths-may-be-undercounted-in-alabama-doctors-say.html
The second part that I think is important to understand is that there is generally a smaller number of doctors-per-capita in southern states. The data I used is available at the Association of American Medical Colleges site here: https://www.aamc.org/data-reports/workforce/data/2019-state-profiles
If you click through to that link you can see the individual states' PDFs available. On Alabama's report, top line, you can see that in 2018 AL had 217.1 active physicians/100,000 population.
Compare this to Ohio which was at 292.7/100,000 in the same year. Also keep in mind that these doctors, along with nurses and other hospital staff, are the most likely to contract COVID-19, removing them from the workforce and lowering this number temporarily.
Finally, I think that the general resistance by many of the our elected officials, especially on the state-level, to educate their electorates on the seriousness of this pandemic, has led to a slow crawl into isolation among populations here.
I'm not making any projections, but the south is particularly prone to COVID-19 if it gets a significant foothold here.
