COVID-19: This Is the Deadliest County in the Deadliest State in America

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jan 22, 7:47AM EST

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COVID-19: This Is the Deadliest County in the Deadliest State in America — © Terryfic3D / Getty Images

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to blitz America. President Biden expects deaths to rise to 500,000 next month. The current grim figure is that 413,259 people have died, after rising by 8,447 yesterday. U.S. deaths currently are about 20% of the world’s total. Vaccine distribution is such that the president’s goal of 100 million vaccinations in his first 100 days in office appears to be a stretch.

The effects of the disease continue to be uneven. One measure of how fatal the disease is geographically is deaths per 100,000 people. Based on that yardstick, Arizona is the deadliest state now, with 2.50 deaths per 100,000 averaged over the past seven days. That is a traditional measure. To show how desperate the situation is, note that the next state down the list, which is Pennsylvania, has a rate of 1.54 deaths per 100,000. The state with the lowest figure is Hawaii at 0.10.

Across Arizona, one county stands out as worse than the others. Gila County has 3.44 deaths per 100,000, based on an average of the past seven days. It sits about halfway between Phoenix and the New Mexico border.

According to the U.S. Census, Gila County has 54,018 residents, which has grown only 1% over the past decade. The population is spread across 4,796 square miles, which means it is not densely populated. By contrast, Detroit has about 700,000 residents and covers only 143 square miles.
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Of the population of Gila County, 62% is white and 19% is Hispanic. Native Americans make up 18% of the population. Less than 1% is Black.

The county is relatively poor. The median value of an owner-occupied home is $165,800, about $100,000 below the national average. The median household income is $43,524, over $20,000 lower than the national number. The poverty rate is 21.1%, about double the national average. There is much evidence that the disease has disproportionately affected the poor throughout America.

Over time, other counties will take the spot as the deadliest county in the deadliest state in America. In the meantime, the suffering in Gila County has to be unimaginable.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.