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Columbia Study Finds Florida and Texas Could Have Avoided 11,000 Deaths Each With Canada’s COVID Measures

Comparing states’ mortality rates to that of neighboring Ontario, researchers found a needless loss of life.

A new study from Columbia University researchers comparing states’ coronavirus mortality rates to those of Ontario, Canada, found that the U.S. suffered tens of thousands of avoidable deaths. Aiming to “estimate the number of lives that might have been avoided if these states had the same benefits from national leadership” as the neighboring Canadian province, which spans the Northern U.S. border from Minnesota to New York, researchers found that Florida and Texas could have saved more than 11,000 lives each had they implemented stricter preventative measures to slow the disease’s spread. Ontario has suffered 3,170 COVID-19 deaths, a rate of 21.76 deaths per 100,000 people, lower than the 15 states measured in the study. Other states—Pennsylvania, Arizona, North Carolina, Ohio, and more—could have saved thousands of lives as well. Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of Columbia’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness and a Daily Beast contributor, previously blamed the Trump administration in summarizing a nationwide study on the same topic, “We believe that this was a monumental, lethal screwup by an administration that didn’t want to deal with reality.”