In my last statistical post I wrote about food insecurity, motor vehicle crash death rates and COVID Case mortality in the 10 county region. For this post, I thought I would write about school funding adequacy, men and women’s income and case mortality. County Health Rankings defines school funding adequacy as “The average gap in dollars between actual and required spending per pupil among public school districts. Required spending is an estimate of dollars needed to achieve U.S. average test scores in each district.” Centre County is $9091 above the required spending per pupil. The relationship is can be seen in the graph below.
There was a negative association between school funding adequacy and COVID Case Mortality while school spending per pupil was not. This relationship accounted for 45.2% of the variability in case mortality. The equation states that for every $10,000 increase in school funding, there is a predicted 0.0123 decrease in the case mortality rate.
Women’s Median Earnings
There was a much stronger negative association for women’s median income and COVID case mortality. This relationship between women’s income and covid case mortality accounted for 64.9% of the variability in COVID case mortality. For every $3,000 increase in women’s median earnings, there is a predicted .00253 decrease in the mortality rate. Conversely, there was a similar positive association between women’s median earnings and COVID vaccination rates, accounting for 59.6% of the variability in vaccination rates.
Men’s Median Earnings
Although still negative, the association between men’s median earnings and COVID mortality was slightly less strong than the association with women’s earnings. Men’s earnings accounted for 52.5% of the variability in COVID case mortality. The model estimates that for every $3,000 increase in men’s earnings, there is a predicted 0.002034 decrease in the COVID mortality rate. The association between men’s earnings and COVID vaccination rates was positive accounting for 53.4% of the variability.
