Next time Donald Trump decides to take his terroristic impulses out on Twitter and tell his supporters to “liberate” themselves from those pesky social distancing restrictions imposed in Democratic- leaning states (and a few Republican-governed states as well), he may want to keep in mind some real basic data.
The older you are, the more likely you are to both vote Republican and die from the coronavirus. Voters aged 80+ are 80 times more likely to die from the coronavirus than those under 40 (16% fatality rate vs. ~0.2%).
This effect is strong enough that people who voted for Trump in the 2016 election are around 30% more likely to die from the coronavirus than Democrats. In some swing states from the 2016 election, such as Pennsylvania, if the coronavirus were to run wild, this effect alone could have wiped out up to 30% of the gap between Republicans and Democrats in the 2016 election.
Tomas Pueyo Brochard has degrees in Industrial and General Engineering from European universities and an MBA from Stanford, according to his Wiki Bio. He lives in Silicon Valley and works in design and marketing online study/course applications for multiple companies. Mr. Pueyo has written three detailed and well-researched articles regarding the COVID-19 Crisis, “Coronavirus, Why You Must Act Now” (March 10, 2020) and “Coronavirus: The Hammer and The Dance” (March 19, 2020), which, as noted in prefatory notes to his third article, “Coronavirus: Out of Many, One”(April 1, 2020), have garnered over 50 million views on Medium. The quotation above is from his latest article on the virus.
Today the New York Times has an equally informative article regarding the length of time we must be prepared endure social distancing, in which Times reporter Donald G. McNeil, Jr., cites Pueyo’s work not once, but twice. Titled, “Coronavirus, The Year Ahead,” it explores in painful detail just how far away we are from returning to any semblance of “normality,” no matter what phony story Donald Trump or his Fox News collaborators may try to sell the public. McNeil’s article in and of itself is a terrific exposition of what we can all expect going forward. But this is a political site, and it was the paragraphs referencing Pueyo’s analysis that captured my eye:
Even voters in Republican-leaning states who do not blame Mr. Trump for America’s lack of preparedness or for limiting access to health insurance may change their minds if they see friends and relatives die.
In one of the most provocative analyses in his follow-up article, “Coronavirus: Out of Many, One,” Mr. Pueyo analyzed Medicare and census data on age and obesity in states that recently resisted shutdowns and counties that voted Republican in 2016.
He calculated that those voters could be 30 percent more likely to die of the virus.
It’s not necessary to analyze all of Pueyo’s conclusions here—his three Medium articles are comprehensive and he relied on the help of a lot of professional experts (who he credits at the end). But the basic fact that Republican voters are more likely to die simply because of their age (and location) is something that his article illustrates quite clearly, relying on simple age/death data when compared to voting preference. And, as Pueyo states, there are other factors indicating a higher rate of morbidity for Republicans, who tend to live in more rural areas:
Many other factors will hurt rural voters more than urban ones. For example, the healthcare system has much less capacity in rural areas. The rural population tends to have worse health, so a higher likelihood of comorbidities that increase the fatality rate of coronavirus. On top of that, they don’t even get more spared by infections: the flu season tends to be delayed in rural areas compared to urban ones, but when it hits, it hits much harder.
Pueyo’s article also confirms why Republican Governors who rely on the fact that their voters live in more widespread, outlying areas (The “we’re not New York City” mantra) have it ass-backwards. He examines flu epidemics in 600 large-scale urban vs. “rural” small towns and concludes that while the infection rate is often more spread out over time in larger cities (due to their size and due to “herd immunity” which has not yet developed to COVID-19), “smaller cities don’t get spared because they’re small. They do get hit, and when they do, the epidemic also hits hard.”
To the extent Republican governors are hesitating to declare strict containment measures for political reasons, it will eventually become clear that they got the politics exactly backwards: instituting stricter measures early-on would have helped keep their most loyal voters alive.
But neither “Republican governors” (for the most part) nor Donald Trump paid any attention to this basic fact. Probably because they, just like their constituents were too busy soaking up the happy lies on Fox News.
It’s clear that “social distancing” measures reduce the fatality rate from COVID-19. It’s equally clear that reducing those efforts would result in more infections and deaths astronomically across the board. But by pushing his sycophants in GOP statehouses to relax “social distancing” measures to fight off the COVID-19 pandemic, and by urging his followers to rebel against those measures in so-called “swing states,” Trump is not only proposing killing more Republicans, he’s also (literally) killing his chances of re-election.