Minnesota has more COVID-19 deaths than non-lockdown neighbors, more unemployment than New York

Imagine taking a non-hot spot for coronavirus, locking down the people, achieving a worse outcome than surrounding states that didn’t lock down, and then suffering worse unemployment from the lockdown than New York. Welcome to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s lockdown magic.

Minnesota is surrounded on three sides by some of the few states in the country that did not formally issue a shelter-in-place order at any time during this crisis. According to the dictates of the lockdown crowd, these states should have been smoldering ash, given their reluctance to do what the “experts” tell us is the best and only way to prevent mass deaths from the virus. Well, it turns out the states that didn’t lock down had low fatality rates, some of them especially low.

Minnesota is surrounded by Iowa to its south and the Dakotas to the west. Unlike Iowa and the Dakotas, Minnesota went full lockdown, ordered by Tim Walz. In the end, the fatality rate per million people of 54 was still relatively low compared to most states in the northeast, but higher than the surrounding states that did not issue lockdown orders. This demonstrates that given the demographics and geography of the upper Midwest states, there was no reason whatsoever for Walz not to follow in the footsteps of his neighbors.

In general, researchers have found absolutely no correlation between early and severe lockdown states and low COVID-19 death numbers. Florida has achieved one of the best results of any large state despite its elderly population. Governor Ron DeSantis was raked over the coals for being late to implement a very weak shelter-in-place order under pressure. Yesterday, he struck back at his opponents: