Today’s New York Times carries an article saying that COVID-19 is now almost exclusively a disease of Republicans: “Red Covid; Covid’s partisan pattern is growing more extreme.” The article is festooned with scientific-looking charts.
(Note that the above chart is just a recent snapshot and does not show total COVID-19 deaths.)
If we are to believe the New York Times,
- support for Republican political candidates leads almost directly to death via COVID-19
- Democrat-controlled media and Democrat-controlled government are deeply concerned about deaths of Republican voters
(Proposition #2 confuses me the most. Back in the summer of 2020, our former neighbors in Massachusetts were positively gleeful at the prospect of conservative Floridians dying en masse due to their governor’s failure to order masks and shutdowns. Despite a year of open schools versus a year of closed schools, FL never did catch up to MA)
Here’s the explanation of how science-denial leads to death:
What distinguishes the U.S. is a conservative party — the Republican Party — that has grown hostile to science and empirical evidence in recent decades. A conservative media complex, including Fox News, Sinclair Broadcast Group and various online outlets, echoes and amplifies this hostility. Trump took the conspiratorial thinking to a new level, but he did not create it.
When they break up the stats by county, the differences are even larger and the correlation becomes more impressive.
But what else is correlated by county? There is a huge rural-urban divide in the U.S. in terms of party affiliation. Government tends to do its great works, and therefore its great spending, in cities. See What will rural American taxpayers get in return for spending on infrastructure?
Big Government spends nearly all of its money in cities so a bigger government accelerates the process of looting from rural Americans to enrich those who live in cities, e.g., with free public housing, improved transportation systems, fancier hospitals, etc.
It makes sense that people who live in more spread-out areas aren’t going to vote for Democrats promising huge spending in cities that they seldom visit.
Why does this matter? If coronavirus is simply taking its time to reach out-of-the-way places, the purported “Republican wave of death” is actually just the virus finally reaching people who couldn’t be reached in the spring of 2020.
Let’s look at South Dakota, where 62 percent of voters failed to vote for the Party of #Science. Is COVID killing the never-masked never-shutdown infidels right now? The NYT says “no”:
Why not? Maybe everyone in South Dakota is vaccinated? Actually, SD is below Florida and has almost the same rate as Texas (ranking; note that California is protected because its vaccination rate is 58.76 percent while Florida is doomed because its vaccination rate is only 56.89 percent), states that the NYT highlights as full of wicked and evil people who are being killed by a Just and Benevolent CoronaGod. If voting Republican leads to death via COVID-19, as the NYT suggests, and salvation lies in having a high vaccination rate, not-very-vaccinated South Dakota should be getting hammered right now. If, on the other hand, the current “Republican wave of death” is merely “the virus getting around to places it didn’t already saturate” then South Dakota is spared current misery due to the virus having killed everyone who could be easily killed by COVID back in November 2020.
Readers: Do you think that the current large differences in COVID-19 daily death rates among states are actually caused by party affiliation? If there is some other cause that we can be confident in, what is it?
What if we hear from an MD/PhD professor at the Stanford medical school?
(Note that I disagree with the Stanford prof’s interpretation of these data. Yes, it is true that a Florida Free State resident of a given age actually had a lower risk of death from COVID-19 than did a locked-down Californian (California has a somewhat lower aggregate death rate due to having a younger population than the U.S. average and than Florida’s). But it is not true that California has made policy mistakes. As demonstrated by the recent governor recall vote, Californians want to be locked down.)
Coastal America (blue states) tend to have mild summers, and long dreary wet winters.
The sunbelt is entirely Republican, unless you count Georgia as Democrat or California as sunbelt. But California already had a sunbelt wave which peaked out in June/July.
NYT is just repeating a seasonal smear of Republicans by relying on correlation rather than causation.
Steve: Interesting. Do you have a hypothesis that we can later test? The NYT says that New York is righteous #BecauseDemocratic. But you’d expect them to have another wave of COVID-19 death this winter? Is that actually possible considering that COVID-19 already killed almost everyone vulnerable in New York back in the spring of 2020? People can’t be killed twice!
Maybe Vermont would be a good test for your theory. They have the nation’s highest vaccination rate. They have the nation’s lowest cumulative COVID-19 death rate (still higher than India’s, though, which was portrayed as a world-ending disaster by our media). They enthusiastically voted for Joe Biden in 2020 (largest margin on the NYT chart).
Also, California and Maryland. The NYT says that these states are being spared currently because they’re populated by Democrats. Presumably that isn’t going to change and, in fact, they’ll become more solidly Democratic as Deplorables seeking freedom move to Florida, South Dakota, and other comparatively free states.
If we want to be scientific about this, where “scientific” has its pre-Covid definition of put forward a hypothesis first rather than retrospectively providing an explanation for how it is the fault of the unvaccinated or the Republicans, etc., we need a date and an outcome.
How about if the hypothesis is that Vermont suffers a fall/winter Covid wave that kills at least 50 percent as many people, adjusted for population, as the current wave in Wyoming, singled out for Deplorability in the NYT article? We pick March 1 as the “end of winter” (and September 1 for the start of fall?)? And the hypothesis test is discontinued if some dramatically effective medical treatment for COVID-19 becomes available prior to March 1 (i.e., the treatment that I wrongly predicted would be available no later than March 2021; see https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2020/04/06/best-guess-as-to-when-the-first-successful-covid-19-therapy-will-be-widely-available/ (I give myself credit only for saying “I’m a big believer that viruses are smarter than human beings.”)). Wyoming has such a small population that it might be challenging to say when the current wave is over. The NYT characterizes Wyoming as a place where people are dying left and right. Your horse or pickup will have to navigate around corpses in Jackson. Yet the Google shows a 7-day average death rate currently of 6 people. Not 6 people per 100,000. 6 deaths per day total in WY. The wave can be declared over when this falls to 1?
California and Maryland have already suffered the loss of quite a few residents tagged to COVID-19. They’re thus more similar to West Virginia, also singled out for Deplorability in the NYT article (relatively high death rate right now on top of a medium cumulative death rate; many evil voters who chose Trump). So the hypothesis for those states can be that they have fall/winter waves that kill at least 50 percent as many people, adjusted for population, as the current wave in West Virginia. We look at deaths from September 1 through March 1 in these states. We say that the current “wave” in WV is over once the number of deaths per day comes down to fewer than 6 per day.
Vermont and HBS are both interesting case studies, as places with near universal vaccination, but little natural immunity.
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2021/09/27/COVID-19-infections-steady-rise-Harvard-Business-School-MBA-students-remote-learning/6451632765461/
I believe WV also had low natural immunity prior to the current outbreak, so it isn’t fair to compare it to Southern California which got ravaged in all waves after the initial wave (summer ’20, winter ’20-’21 and summer ’21). Northen California is like a different state.
Creating a testable hypothesis is tough because vaccination does reduce the seriousness of infections (thereby implying more asymptomatic and untested infection), but also creates a natural immunity deficit. Lockdowns create a total immunity deficit.
I think the wildcard is whether people can still develop something close to sterilizing immunity when they are infected AFTER vaccination. If they can, blue states will outperform. If not, red states (really rural areas and black/latino areas) will outperform in the long-run.
September is an interesting time of year. The sunbelt is still dealing with lingering heat and caseload from the summer wave, while cold and dark are settling into the north. Currently AK,MT,ID,WY,ND,WV have the highest case rates. But the coasts have mild autumns.
I agree with your suggestion of using Vermont as a test case, although using all of New England might be better since the region has all the highest vaccinated states in the country, low infection rates since the first wave, and outbreaks tend to be regional. It’s really the durability of the vaccine that’s being tested here; will the breakthrough infections, which will likely afflict all the vaccinated, ever become serious?
Based on the patterns so far:
Southwest (S CA, NV, AZ) has two waves, both at the solstices. Too sunny in June, too dark w/ quick temp drops in December.
Southeast and S Central (TX to FL) has one wave, June to September, when it is insufferably hot and sticky.
Midwest, High-Plains, and N Rockies has one wave, from September to December, when darkness, dry air, and early winter set in.
Northeast (and possible Pac-NW) has a late-winter wave, from December to March, when it is cold, dark, and stormy.
September is the transition month from SE to High-Plains, when the seasonality of NYT vitriol really picks up.
Keep in mind the Northeast (ex Provincetown) has not yet experienced a seasonal wave with Delta as the dominant variant…
Steve: It is funny that you mention Harvard Business School. A friend’s daughter is in her first year there. I was just talking to my friend last night. It sees that after a week or two of the in-person classes for which Dad is paying… total shutdown due to some healthy 24-year-old testing positive.
(I’m not sure he should/could be upset with the situation since he is a Massachusetts Democrat who has been an vocal denouncer of Donald Trump, a big advocate for masks and shutdowns (#FollowTheScience), etc.)
If the NYT is so scientific, perhaps they could explain the unusual summer outbreaks in places like Florida. I don’t think the hypothesis that a righteous virus targets Republicans is sufficient.
Without looking up the stats, it seems to me that the evil Republican states also have a much higher rate of Hispanics and Black people, who have a disproportionate number of cases.
Hispanics for example actually work and cannot hide in the luxury mansions of the virtuous states (unless they are cleaning them).
Incidentally, it seems that the evil states are feeding the righteous states. Perhaps some of the righteous would like to trade places with those working in agriculture, so those states can be educated properly.
“A conservative media complex, including Fox News, Sinclair Broadcast Group and various online outlets, echoes and amplifies this hostility.”
Fox News has the only scientific coverage of social sciences and evolutionary biology these days.
Being from Europe, I was taught that Fox News is the devil himself/herself/zirself/themselves. But CNN got so bad that Fox News now seems like progressive/left news from the 1990s.
Do you think that the current large differences in COVID-19 daily death rates among states are actually caused by party affiliation? If there is some other cause that we can be confident in, what is it?
Thankfully our fine host Phil is a NY Times subscriber! I am not a subscriber so am limited to 5 articles per month. We do know that the NY Times is “the paper of record” and therefore everything it prints is the truth. I am surprised that we don’t take this to the next level. Now that we know the covid is a pandemic of republicans why not shut down the virus. Let’s round up all of these carriers of the virus and move them to quarantine camps! We must follow the science and even one death is too many.
I thought Farmers USA get plenty of cash from the Great Father in Washington:
https://usafacts.org/articles/federal-farm-subsidies-what-data-says/
Not white farmers…. https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2021/0901/Debt-relief-for-only-Black-farmers-Not-so-fast-say-white-farmers
Federico: With farms at 0.6 percent of GDP (see https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery/chart-detail/?chartId=58270 ) and most people in rural areas not actually owning a farm, I don’t think votes from farmers, and people closely affiliated with farmers, are a significant percentage of the marked-for-death Republicans to which the NYT was referring.
(The article that you cite talks about $22.6 billion/year in farm payouts for all of rural America. Compare to about $1.5 trillion/year in spending on Medicare and Medicaid, nearly all of which happens in cities. https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Statistics-Trends-and-Reports/NationalHealthExpendData/NHE-Fact-Sheet )
Wait a sec, if people in rural states do not farm (or ranch, seeing any differences between the two is just semantics), what the deuce do they do?
Federico: I think “rural” in the U.S. just means “not a dense suburb of a big city or a city itself.” So an area rural enough to vote Republican contains a lot of people who, at least before coronapanic, would drive to work at a full range of employers that form rings around cities and/or are arranged linearly along highways.
Federico: Work for people who _own_ a farm, otherwise the same as the useful jobs in big cities (they won’t set up a bitcoin exchange to fleece people …).
In general, I’m pro farm subsidies. Relying on imports and not eating for a year in case of a real crisis does not sound like a good prospect (though many Americans could probably last that long without food).
“Do you think that the current large differences in COVID-19 daily death rates among states are actually caused by party affiliation?”
Absolutely.
I’d say anyone taking anything NYT writes as anything other than blatant lies and propaganda counts as a good sales lead for my bridge brokerage.
In other words their “data” is pure unadulterated junk. They were caught pulling “facts” out of their derrieres so many times I totally lost count. As junk, it doesn’t even warrant discussion, leave alone explanation. Simple as that.
I would like to hear more about this bridge!
This time last year the virus could tell the difference between a mostly peaceful BLM protest and a Trump rally.
Hasn’t #science proven that evil Republicans die because they are evil Republicans infidels?
It seems unscientific to look beyond a scientifically proven tautology that is true by definition.
Studies are distorted because there are no people in places like Montana and Wyoming, only horses. A few of the horses have people on them just to make it interesting, but about half the people on horses are from out-of-state. All this defeats correlation and science, so the only data available are from Fox and Sinclair.
The virus, being unaware of how it should behave, just keeps lowering life expectancy everywhere.
Well, party affiliation could be a rough proxy for vaccination rates, there’s a -33% gap in republicans getting vaccinated, and the unvaccinated have about a 11x higher risk of death from covid. Query: did Phil receive a covid vaccination?
To avoid deportation to a Protection Camp (see https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2021/08/22/internment-camps-for-the-unvaccinated/ ), anyone who isn’t vaccinated will have to say “I got vaccinated at a clinic for the undocumented and then I lost my card.” So it isn’t productive to ask people whether they’re vaccinated. In the current political environment, the only possible answer is “yes”.
Separately, if you adjusted for location and occupation, I would seriously doubt that there is a huge gap by party affiliation in vaccination rate. FL and CA have almost identical vaccination rates, despite California being Deplorable-free. https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/public-health/states-ranked-by-percentage-of-population-vaccinated-march-15.html
(That’s not to say that you wouldn’t be able to find innumerate journalists reporting a huge gap by party affiliation!)
Shark attacks increase as ice cream sales increase, but the root cause is extreme temperatures. Same with Covid. It’s very hot so people stay inside more and there’s less outside airflow. That increases Covid transmission. When it’s very cold, people in the Northeast will be staying inside with less outside airflow with similar effects.
It’s not rocket science.