The findings from researchers at Nationhood Lab, the University of Illinois Chicago, and the HealthPartners Institute found the American Nations regional cultures to be one of the most powerful predictive elements in predicting county-level pandemic mortality and cases.
In a newly published paper in Nature‘s sister journal, Scientific Reports, Nationhood Lab director Colin Woodard and his research collaborators report the successful testing of their ecological framework model of health to predict Covid-19 mortality and case rates at the U.S. county-level.
The model, first presented in the journal Progress in Cardiovascular Disease in May 2025, incorporates measures of politics, policy, socioeconomics, lifestyle behaviors, chronic disease risk factors and the dominant, regional-level cultures described in Woodard’s American Nations and laid out for an academic audience in a companion paper. Using an artificial intelligence-powered statical approach, Woodard’s collaborators at the HealthPartners Institute in Minnesota and the University of Illinois Chicago previously showed its efficacy at predicting county-level life expectancy, physical inactivity, obesity, and Alzheimer-related dementia rates.
In the new paper, lead authors Ross Arena and Shauijie Wang of UIC used a similar AI technique to test the model’s ability to predict per capita Covid-19 cases and deaths at a county-level, which it did with impressive accuracy. The model’s most valuable component, according to the analysis, was the American Nations factor, which was the top ranked of 30 variables for helping predict Covid cases and the third ranked for Covid deaths.
The country’s health challenges, Arena wrote, are “being compounded by an unprecedented culture clash and the politicization of health-related decisions and outcomes…based on regional disparities.”
The researchers have previously used American Nations model to reveal and explain the spatial patterns of a wide range of health indices, including the prevalence of diabetes, obesity, disabilities, arthritis and preventable oral health problems. The ongoing collaboration has gained signifiant attention in the health sciences field, with 35 peer-reviewed papers published in as many months.
Nationhood Lab, based at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy at Salve Regina University, is an interdisciplinary research, writing, testing and dissemination project focused on counteracting the authoritarian threat to American democracy and the centrifugal forces threatening the federation’s stability. The project delivers more effective tools with which to describe and defend the American liberal democratic tradition and better understand the forces undermining it.