A study grading state responses to COVID-19 between 2020 and 2021 crowned Texas with a “C.” The Committee to Unleash Prosperity’s report card ranked the Lone Star state in 25th place. The rankings were due to decisions that their study claims impacted each state’s economy, education, and mortality during the pandemic.
“Texas did fairly well among big states,” said Steve Forbes, former U.S. presidential candidate and co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity. “Florida ranked above Texas probably because the governor moved sooner on ending the lockdowns.”
Gov. Ron DeSantis ended capacity restrictions on Florida businesses on September 25, 2020, whereas Texas ended restrictions on March 10, 2021, according to the Office of the Texas Governor website.
“California had a lower death rate than Texas,” said Steve Moore, one of the study’s authors and a co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity. “Texas had a fairly high death rate. That’s one of the reasons Texas ranked in the middle of the pack.”
The report card shows age-adjusted COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 were 211.3 in Utah, 256.1 in California, 265.1 in Florida, and 390.2 in Texas. The state with the highest age-adjusted COVID-19 death rate was Mississippi, at 450.2, and the lowest was Vermont at 81.7.
Other states earning a “C” grade on the report card include Georgia, Alabama, Wyoming, and Louisiana.
“Louisiana had a high death rate, and Louisiana has a lot of people eating fried food,” Moore told The Dallas Express. “People are overweight. So, the diet isn’t very good, and you get a lot of people with diabetes, but the press didn’t want to mention obesity because we don’t shame people who are fat and that kind of thing. But isn’t it important to let people know that if you’re overweight, you’re at risk for the complications associated with COVID? So, sometimes political correctness can lead to more death.”
Compared to Texas, the report branded Florida with an “A,” along with South Dakota and Montana.
“They had a pretty high death rate in Texas, and if you look at the states that got hit hard by COVID, it’s Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, which are all border states,” said Moore, who is a fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Institute for Economic Freedom. “The speculation is that there were a lot of people crossing over the border, bringing COVID with them, and that probably raised the death rate in those states. Meanwhile, they also have a lot of Indian reservations in New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona, and there was a big COVID problem on Indian reservations as well.”
The History of Texas website lists Alabama-Coushatta, Tigua, Kickapoo, and Lipan Apache tribes as federal and state Indian reservations located in Texas.
“Don’t shut down your economy if there’s another outbreak,” Moore advises. “Keep your businesses open, keep your schools open, let people make their own decisions, and you’ll have a much better economic outcome. States like California are going to be paying for the cost of these lockdowns for years and years to come.”
California earned an “F” grade along with New Mexico and Illinois.
“The economic damage to the state of California was very considerable,” Moore said in an interview. “California had very high unemployment as a result of a lot of people losing their jobs and business failures because of the lockdowns. Another factor is that California kept its schools closed for a long time. Shutting down schools was a catastrophic mistake.”
The Freedom Foundation’s Timothy Snowball is not surprised by the report card’s findings.
“Florida was diametrically opposed to the policies of California but had very similar infection rates, so based upon that, it looks like masking, Zoom school, the shutdowns, and the business closures all had very little impact on the spread of COVID and, if that’s the case, this will go down in history as the biggest government overreaction in the last hundred years in terms of domestic policy,” Snowball told The Dallas Express.
He blames what he considers an overreaction in regards to COVID on politics and the media.
“You had the pressure of an election year, and we’d be remiss not to mention the impact of the 24-hour news cycle,” Snowball said in an interview. “Before the internet age, there wasn’t this constant bombardment of the news, and because these 24-hour news cycles have to constantly be putting out story after story and getting viewers, they wind up having an incentive to hype things up and make things into emergency situations.”
Snowball, an attorney, sued the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) and the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA). The two organizations represent 30,000 California teachers. Snowball represented a coalition of Los Angeles-area parents who alleged in their complaint that, in keeping schools closed, LAUSD prioritized the union’s social agenda over the education of students.
LAUSD and UTLA settled the lawsuit with the parents for an undisclosed sum of money.
“It’s pretty clear that the teacher’s unions in California, just like in states like Illinois and New York, drove the education agenda,” Moore said. “In fact, we now know that the teacher’s unions wrote the guidelines, and so they played a big role in keeping the schools closed. We’re going to be living with the damage for years and decades because it’s hard if you are 8 or 9 years old to make up for all the lost educational ground.”
The Committee report card graded Illinois with an “F” and New York with an “F minus.”
“They show us that lockdowns were not a very good strategy, and so our hope is that we’ll never do this again,” Moore said. “Hopefully, we’ll never shut down our economy or our schools ever again.”
The report card further attributed Utah with an “A+,” the highest grade.
“We have previously ranked states on how they perform economically, and Utah has emerged in the first place 12 straight years, so there’s something about Utah, and obviously it’s a Mormon state, so I think the Mormon culture is very entrepreneurial, very family-oriented, and very much believing in self-reliance not dependence on the government,” Moore added. “I think those are some of the keys to their success. People in Utah obviously acted in a smart way. They didn’t go to crowded bars, people were masking, and they were social distancing.”
