U.S. states with the lowest vaccination rates are recording many more deaths from COVID-19 than their highly vaccinated peers.
A DailyMail.com analysis finds that 10 states - Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Dakota, Tennessee, West Virginia and Wyoming - with the lowest vaccination rates accounted for 73.9 deaths per 100,000 residents, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
By comparison, the 10 states with the highest vaccination rates - Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington - recorded 18.9 deaths per 100,000 residents.
That means Americans living in the least vaccinated states are dying at a rate nearly four times as high as those in the most vaccinated states.
It comes as data show three states in the South, Alabama, Georgia and Texas are responsible for one-third of the more than 10,000 deaths in the nation last week.
Experts say that fatalities are a lagging indicator and often don't start to decline until three or four weeks after cases and hospitalizations do, which means that deaths are expected to soon fall.
The ten states with the highest vaccination rates are recording only a quarter as many deaths per 100,000 as the states with the ten lowest vaccination rates. The average death rate per 100,000 residents for the least vaccinated states is 73.9, while it is only 17.8 for the most vaccinated
Unvaccinated Americans have bared the brunt of the COVID-19 pandemic since the Delta variant-fueled surge began in early summer.
Nearly all Covid deaths and hospitalizations in the U.S. are among unvaccinated people, despite this group making up less than 30 percent of the adult population.
States with lower vaccination rates have also suffered from more spread of the virus, and dwindling hospital resources to deal with surges of cases.
All of the ten states with the lowest vaccination
