On Wednesday, the total number of new cases of COVID-19 in the United States exceeded 100,000 for the first time. Which was a shocking total … until Thursday, when the total passed 120,000 cases. With that number, even the seven-day moving average of new cases is now over 100,000. This isn’t a “spike,” or a “surge”—it’s a tsunami.
But even though the flood of new cases is sweeping across the whole nation, driving up hospitalizations and bringing more than 1,000 deaths a day, it’s not sinking everyone equally. Because even a cursory review of the information shows that both the counties where the coronavirus is spreading most rapidly and the counties where there are more cases by population are counties that voted for Donald Trump. And a new study makes it clear that this isn’t coincidental. It’s also not a matter of some factor that lies outside of human control. The reason that red states and Trump-supporting counties are getting COVID-19 at a higher rate is specifically because they are populated by Trump supporters. And it’s killing them.
As the Associated Press reports, the data available from Johns Hopkins, WorldOMeters, and other tracking sites makes it clear that the highest level of COVID-19 is not where a casual observer might expect. The worst locations aren’t in high-density cities, or in areas where there’s a high level of travel. They are small, rural counties. In fact, most of them are rural counties in rural states like Iowa, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin.
And 93% of the counties with the worst rates of coronavirus infection voted for Donald Trump. In fact, they voted overwhelmingly for Trump. And the worse the infection, the more dire the local situation, the more likely they were to vote for Trump.
All of this may seem extremely counterintuitive. But that’s because the lens the AP presents is somewhat looking at the data backwards. It’s not that counties are voting for Trump because they have a higher rate of COVID-19. It’s that these counties have a higher rate of COVID-19 specifically because they support Trump.
In a paper published in Nature just before the election, researchers from Yale and New York University approached the problem from a different direction. Using data from the 2016 election, they looked at how people in Trump counties were behaving versus the people in Clinton counties. What they found was a stark difference that explains the AP results.
Trump counties practiced less social distancing. People in those counties were also less likely to wear masks. And, again mirroring the AP data, the more a county supported Trump, the worse it was on these safety measures. People in Trump counties were more likely to ignore stay-at-home orders. They were more likely to ignore mask mandates. They were less likely to practice safe social distancing. And even as the disease was spreading, this partisan divide was getting worse.
And there was one other factor:
“Additionally, county-level consumption of conservative media (Fox News) was related to reduced physical distancing.”
COVID-19 is worse in Trump counties … because they are Trump counties. Listening to Trump, watching Fox News, believing the messages that the conservative media spreads, is not just sickening; it’s deadly.
“… the observed partisan differences in distancing were associated with subsequently higher COVID-19 infection and fatality growth rates in pro-Trump counties.”