Just for fun, it's also worth noting that "Texas, Oklahoma ranked among least safest states in the country" doesn't actually mean anything - at least not anything of importance. It feels like it should mean those states are "unsafe" but that's not necessarily true.

There must always be a "most safe" and "least safe" state (by a given measure) - but if the spread between them is insignificant then that's not particularly important information. Even less so when the headline qualifies with "ranks among" so they're not even the actual least safe.

Drug overdoses are probably a pretty minor impact to safety though, right? And vaccination rates are a pretty standard way to indicate the safety of a community against a virus...

Sure, so I guess you're being willingly misled here because the most important thing is dunking on red states due to your politics. So, if some random article says "Dallas is less safe than NYC," you are forced to believe it even though the article weighted covid vaccine rate at 90% and murder at 10%.

The average American is much more likely to die from Covid than from murder (and, in the recent past, Covid was the far more likely fate), so this doesn't seem crazy on its face.

What is an average American?

The number of deaths divided by the number of Americans. The phrase "average American" is shorthand for "statistically across all Americans".

Sure, but the relevant statistic is Covid death rate, not vaccination rate. And by death rate, Texas is actually #21 (#1 being best) among states and surprisingly safer than New York:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...

I have no interest in dunking on red states or praising blue ones. I think that divide is both stupid and missing the point. We're way better served by looking at things like class divide, imo.

Also, the methodology gave murders per Capita double weight and vaccine percentages double weight. Both are numbers bound between 0 and 1, and both have a significant impact on population safety.

So no, I'd much rather talk about why someone would make those weightings and what the correct ratings should be using a statistical analysis mixed with some judgements of how safe I feel in the face of those statistics.