New Mexico has healthiest community in the nation, annual report says
Los Alamos County in New Mexico did it again by ranking as the healthiest community in the country, according to the U.S. News and World Report’s annual healthiest community rankings.
“Los Alamos is a well-educated, economically strong community, and those factors along with others have allowed it to be a healthy community consistently year after year,” said Alex Matthews, data editor at U.S. News and World Report.
Rounding out the top five healthiest areas were Douglas County, Colorado; Falls Church, Virginia; Loudoun County, Virginia; and Broomfield County, Colorado.
Iowa was the most-represented state in the new report released Tuesday, where 61 of its total 99 counties were ranked among the top 500 healthiest communities in the nation.
However, not every state was featured in this year’s list. No counties in Arkansas, Delaware, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina or West Virginia were included among the ranked healthiest areas.
“We weighted the metrics according to what public health experts believed to be the most important,” Matthews said. “While some communities in these states may have scored well on various metrics none had a high enough overall score to be ranked in the top 500.”
The report evaluated approximately 3,000 communities nationwide across 84 health and health-related metrics in 10 categories, from education and population health to infrastructure and environment, according to a press release.
2020 rankings: These are the healthiest US communities in 2020
One key finding showed Los Alamos County had the 17th-lowest COVID-19 case rate overall out of the communities included in the analysis.
“While we considered metrics that predated the pandemic to produce the rankings themselves, we also looked at COVID-19 data as a complementary analysis because we still wanted to know how these communities were faring in the pandemic, even if those numbers weren’t included in the actual scoring and ranking,” Matthews said.
The data was collected in collaboration with the Aetna Foundation, an affiliate of CVS Health dedicated to improving health in local communities, and the University of Missouri Center for Applied Research and Engagement Systems.
Top 10 Counties
Los Alamos County, New Mexico
Douglas County, Colorado
Falls Church, Virginia
Loudoun County, Virginia
Broomfield County, Colorado
San Miguel County, Colorado
Pitkin County, Colorado
Howard County, Maryland
Morgan County, Utah
Routt County, Colorado
