How did we calculate the Economic Vulnerability Score?

We devoured a ton of economic data from many sources and isolated the most important economic factors based on how COVID-19 was unfolding. Our differentiating consideration was that we were trying to gauge only the economic impact and not the health impact of these factors. We are not epidemiologists and wanted to play to our strengths.

This is how we calculate the Economic Vulnerability Score:

• We isolated 18 of the the most pertinent indicators based on availability and prevailing stream of research / thinking.
• We bucketed them into four overarching buckets and weighted each metric on perceived importance towards economic vulnerability. Importance was based on prevailing evidence, logic and reason (“Importance”).
• We assigned a confidence level (1% to 100%) to each metric based on how good and recent the data was (“Confidence”).
• Multiplying Importance and Confidence gave us our metric multiplier, or effective weight (“Multiplier”).
• We then assigned a “least vulnerable” and “most vulnerable” value to each metric based on evidence, logic and reason.
• We normalized (range-scaled) the metrics to remove any differences in the size of the metrics.
• We then multiplied the normalized metrics with the multiplier to give us an independent score for each state.
• We then calculated the worst possible score and took that as the denominator to calculate the vulnerability score as a %.