April 29, 2022 (HealthDay News) — Thousands of COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. South could have been avoided if more people masked, social distanced, kept kids from school and made other behavioral changes to reduce the spread of the virus, researchers say.
In other words, if they had acted more like folks up North.
The study authors suggested that if the entire United States had followed the lead of the Northeast in taking such measures, more than 316,000 COVID-19 deaths might have been prevented before Omicron became the dominant variant.
More than six in 10 of those potentially avoidable deaths were in the South, according to the team at Georgetown University School of Nursing and Health Studies, in Washington, D.C.
“Our study is the first to quantify avoidable deaths and confirm that both COVID-19 deaths and avoidable deaths disproportionately occurred in the South,” study co-author Michael Stoto said.