During 2020 – the opening year of Covid 19 (or Corona Virus 19) – United Van Lines helped around 80,000 American families move from one state to another, and here is the list showing how many were moving into each state, and how many were leaving each state, as ranked according to the percentage who were moving in there.

79,387 Total Shipments, 1 January 2020 to 21 December 2020.

Inbound Shipments, Outbound Shipments, Inbound %

(48) New Jersey, 1074 in, 2451 out, 30%

Vermont was eliminated from the overall results because there were so few shipments too or from Vermont. And, when I also asked the company about the absence of Alaska and of Hawaii, they told me that there’s “No Hawaii or Alaska as they are not considered domestic moves because of they way household goods are shipped.” Consequently, only 48 states, plus DC, were included in their report.

Two factors are generally used in order to rate how safe a locale is against a resident’s becoming struck by the Covid 19 disease – the disease rate per million inhabitants, and the death rate per million inhabitants – however, since the two ranking systems tend to produce remarkably similar rankings (with the death rates merely being a lagging indicator, months behind the disease rates), we shall use here be using only the disease rates.

Below is presented each of these states’ rank in the lowness of the percentage of its population who have become diagnosed as being sick from Covid 19 (and each given state’s rate of that sickness, to date, per million inhabitants); so, the lower the numbers are here, the safer its residents have been against this epidemic (and you can see that the disease rates vary enormously from one state to another).

Alaska was N° 25 (64,256)

So: If a state’s effectiveness at protecting its occupants from this epidemic is increasing that state’s attractiveness as a place to live, then one would expect to find that, for example, the top ten scorers in the first list, by inbound percentage, would have lower infection rates per million, and the bottom ten would have higher infection rates per million; but the reverse is true: the top ten on inbound percentage have Covid 19 disease rates of 74,094 per million, whereas the bottom ten have Covid 19 disease rates of 68,442 per million. Furthermore, the top scoring state on its having the lowest Covid 19 disease rate, which is Vermont, has virtually nobody moving into the state, and virtually nobody leaving the state. However, that state, though it was not ranked inbound versus outbound, actually should have been ranked; and the United Van Lines press release, on January 4th, which was headlined “United Van Lines‘ National Migration Study Reveals Where And Why Americans Moved In 2020”, noted, only in passing, in a footnote, that, “*Although Vermont experienced the highest percentage of inbound moves overall, United Van Lines moved fewer than 250 families in and out of the state. The inbound and outbound rankings in the 2020 study only reflect states with 250 moves or more.” They meant that in Vermont, the total of both inbound and outbound was below 250, and that, among those few, Vermont’s inbound ratio was even higher than N°1 Idaho’s 70%, so that fewer than 75 of those families were moving out of the state.) So: actually, the N°1 state as regards protecting its inhabitants from Covid 19 happens to be, also, the state that has actually the highest inbound | outbound ratio, even higher than does Idaho. Apparently, Vermont is an exception to the general rule that Americans are finding the riskier states to be more attractive to move to. This might indicate that if only Americans had been informed, for example, that South Dakota has the second highest Covid 19 disease rate in the country (exceeded only by North Dakota – which has the entire world’s highest Covid 19 disease rate), then South Dakota would not be the state that has the nation’s fourth highest inbound/outbound ratio (actually, the 5th highest, if Vermont had been included).

Consequently, though Americans don’t generally seem to be attracted to states that have performed well on this, but – to the contrary – appear, on balance, to be attracted to states that have performed poorly on it (they’re generally leaving the safer states, in order to relocate into the more dangerous states), Vermont is a remarkable exception, but one that only few Americans even know about.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

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