Trump/Pence signs save communities from coronaplague

by philg

“Understanding Spatial Variation in COVID-19 across the United States” (National Bureau of Economic Research):

We also find that the severity of the disease is politically patterned: even when controlling for density, counties with a high proportion of Trump
voters in the 2016 general election have lower cases and deaths.

In other words, even the coronavirus cannot bear the sight of a Trump/Pence sign on a front lawn!

So… if you want to find a place in the U.S. where children are likely to be able to go back to school in September, a thinly populated state that voted for Trump in 2016 is the safest choice.

Combining the election results map with states ranked by Covid-19 deaths and states ranked by population density… it looks like the states in which children are most likely to be able to go to school, play on the playground, run around without a mask, etc. are the following:

  • Alaska (no income tax)
  • Wyoming (no income tax)
  • Montana
  • North Dakota
  • South Dakota (no income tax)
  • Utah
  • Idaho
  • Nevada (no income tax)

Among the above, my bet is on South Dakota as the least likely to be perturbed by the plague. Based on my source on the ground there, the state had a minimal shutdown, actually tried to reopen schools before the year ran out (unionized teachers thwarted these efforts, though), and has committed to reopening schools and universities in the fall (example).

Readers: What are your bets for which states will offer residents the closest experience to a normal life? (not a “new normal”, which is code for “bad”!)

7 thoughts on “Trump/Pence signs save communities from coronaplague”

  1. West Virginia. I have a couple of friends there, one of whom is a private pilot, and they’re working hard to get the schools open safely in the fall. They haven’t committed to a full reopening yet, but their stats are looking good, in some ways better than South Dakota’s:

    https://covid19-projections.com/us-wv

    Also, one of the dilemmas in WV is that a lot of people don’t have broadband internet access in their homes, so being able to send their kids back to school is a priority for a lot of people. If their statistics hold up through the summer I think they’re going to be going back to school.

    • If they say “open safely”, isn’t that code for “maybe don’t open” or “maybe open with a huge list of restrictions on the children”? This is Karenspeak! Of course we would like to go to work and send children to school, but we need it to be safe, so that might mean waiting for a vaccine.

    • Well, it’s tricky in West Virginia. The data show the risk is exceedingly low and the deaths are exceedingly low, but in the past several years the teacher’s union in West Virginia has gotten a big boost from astroturfed support and money from folks like Michael Moore, partially in response to Republicans flipping the WV Senate several years ago. So even if they have 0.0 deaths all the way through August, there’s the distinct possibility that the union will refuse to allow the schools to reopen or make it as difficult as possible.

      http://iceuftblog.blogspot.com/2018/09/michael-moore-latest-movie-covers.html

  2. This whole thing will end once the states and cities start running out of money. Once public workers start getting laid off, the incumbent politicians will lose their base of support.

    We are reaching the limits of monetary and fiscal intervention. The run up of the stock market reflects all that money injected by the Fed needing somewhere to go.

    New York City just emerged last year from financial oversight from the 1970’s (Ford to City: Drop Dead). The stagflation of the whole decade of the 1970’s has been rolled into three months. Lots of featherbed jobs are no longer sustainable.

    There is also a hysteria surrounding this that is fueled by a mass media that has actively suppressed dissenting viewpoints — people are scared out of their wits and you don’t acquire the mathematical literacy necessary to independently understand the situation in Critical Theory courses. Even looking at the matter as a Hegelian dialectic, since no antithesis has been offered to the thesis of “New Normal”, no synthesis can emerge to get people moving again.

    People are psychologically invested in the Coronavirus being a deadly plague that can kill anybody, anywhere, and that isolation is the only correct action. People hate to admit they are wrong, or that they have been duped.

    Nobody in good health under seventy-five years of age should be doing anything different with their lives than they were doing in late February. That’s plainly evident now. People at high risk should consider taking mitigating steps, but it must be a personal choice. I have noticed that the really old are not that scared of this thing. If you can remember polio, the Wuhan Flu is a walk in the park.

    2020 is the year the world contemplated its mortality, and lost its mind in the process.

    • I never thought I’d see our quandary with coronavirus cast as an incomplete Hegelian dialectic, but it was fun to read!

      But I disagree. I don’t think anyone had any choice from a public health perspective. We are not Sweden, we’re a lot messier and less conscientious and disciplined than Sweden. Once it was understood that the virus was uncontained and we weren’t protecting the most vulnerable first, which was unforgivable, it started burning through the hard hit areas like NY, NJ, CT and MA, and the lockdowns were inevitable. They simply weren’t going to sit back and do nothing while thousands of people were dying in emergency rooms and nursing homes, and at that point they had very few other options than trying to do what Italy did, what Spain did, what they did during the 1918 influenza, etc.

      By the time we closed the door on travel, the superspreaders were already superspreading and the horse was out of the barn. I knew we were in big trouble first with the nursing home in Washington state and then the Biogen conference. It was on both coasts, nobody knew how it got there, and it was very infectious.

      “The Commonwealth of Massachusetts noted that more than half of its 179 confirmed cases of COVID-19 have been tied to that Biogen meeting.”

      https://www.biospace.com/article/approximately-100-covid-19-cases-stem-from-biogen-meeting/

      You say that nobody 75 or younger in good health should be doing anything different than they were in February, but that was never going to happen after Biogen.

      And now, we’re really screwed, because unless we get the reproduction rate well below 1.0 and keep it there – which will take a miracle – it’s going to be a long, slow burn. I think we’re going to see more than 300,000 deaths by the end of the year.

  3. “This whole thing will end once the states and cities start running out of money. Once public workers start getting laid off, the incumbent politicians will lose their base of support.”

    I think you’re correct, but there is another piece that will help move things along. College Football. Football is a pretty big deal in 49 of the 50 states. Nick Saban is not going to allow a few old people in nursing homes to diminish his comp package.

Comments are closed.