We have a sicker populace in Louisiana with more co-morbidities underlying illnesses such as diabetes, hypertension and obesity than a lot of other cities do in the country, said Kanter from the state health department. Yes, we think that the people of Louisiana have a high degree of vulnerability, and were worried that that might translate into a higher percentage of hospitalization.
Simon Johnson, a professor at MIT, has developed a model that pinpoints Louisiana as the next place where covid-19 will wreak havoc. The co-director of MITs coronavirus alliance and his team assigned risk scores to every county in the United States based on the medical factors that make a person vulnerable to severe illness from coronavirus: age, obesity, diabetes and hypertension. The areas that he says were flashing red as having high rates of all of those are Louisiana and its neighbors Alabama and Mississippi.
This is what we believe happened in Bergamo, he said, referring to a region of Italy that has been hit hard by the virus. It was a lot of vulnerable people living together in close quarters that caused the devastation.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/coronavirus-new-orleans-mardi-gras/2020/03/26/8c8e23c8-6fbb-11ea-b148-e4ce3fbd85b5_story.html?outputType=amp
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"COVID-19 Relative Risk Factors Comparison per State"
https://www.covidalliance.com/interactive-data-tools
The interactive map represents a relative risk profile of counties within each state. The red areas on the map represent regions with higher relative risk compared to the white ones. To categorize counties e produced a score that ranges from 0 to 6, 6 being the highest risk. For each of the risk factors a county can be given 2, 1, or 0 points if it belongs to the top 25%, top 50%, or bottom 50% of counties in the state, respectively. The risk profile was created on the basis of three categories hypertension, diabetes, and obesity.
We have overlaid the number of known COVID-19 cases in the form of blue circles on top of the corresponding county.[i/]