Wednesday, March 16, 2016

Health Data, First Blush

I'm playing with the 2016 county health data. You can too, if you like. Just visit here. I have data for every county in the U.S. and another file of just Georgia.

A few quick Georgia findings:
  • The same counties, usually white and well off, do best in these measures. Forsyth and Oconee both often top the lists of good measures, or at the bottom on bad measures.
  • The number of mentally unhealthy days is almost perfectly correlated with the number of physically unhealthy days (r = .97). 
  • Also correlated, but less perfectly, is obesity and smoking (r = .55).
On another day I'll do some fun rankings of the counties. Gotta dull academic meeting to attend this afternoon. But before I do, given I didn't have a good night of sleep last evening, I'll report the results of percent who do not get sufficient sleep. The worst off are (rank, with percent in parentheses):

1. Clayton (47%)
2. Calhoun (46%)
3. Hancock, Dougherty, and Clay (45%)
6. Taliaferro, Burke, Mitchell, and Macon (44%).

OK, bored now. My own Clarke County (home of UGA) doesn't rate high in this, which is surprising.  The best counties for snoozing are Towns, Union, and Forsyth counties, with only 32 percent reporting insufficient sleep. 

If I lived there, I'd sleep too.

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