The second lowest of five bands is not “the middle band”.
I would agree that it is not particularly notable; a lot of the headlines are “look at the big numerator and ignore the big denominator, because narrative agenda”.
My comment about CA being in the middle band assumes the states were divided into 5 quantiles, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantile, and that the upper (>=1.10%) and lower (<=-0.50%) quantiles are the extremes.
