via David Leonhardt of the New York Times:
Then the vaccines arrived.
They proved so powerful, and the partisan attitudes toward them so different, that a gap in Covid’s death toll quickly emerged. I have covered that gap in two newsletters — one this summer, one last month — and today’s newsletter offers an update.
The brief version: The gap in Covid’s death toll between red and blue America has grown faster over the past month than at any previous point.
In October, 25 out of every 100,000 residents of heavily Trump counties died from Covid, more than three times higher than the rate in heavily Biden counties (7.8 per 100,000). October was the fifth consecutive month that the percentage gap between the death rates in Trump counties and Biden counties widened.
The article cites my data in two places:
Some conservative writers have tried to claim that the gap may stem from regional differences in weather or age, but those arguments fall apart under scrutiny. (If weather or age were a major reason, the pattern would have begun to appear last year.) The true explanation is straightforward: The vaccines are remarkably effective at preventing severe Covid, and almost 40 percent of Republican adults remain unvaccinated, compared with about 10 percent of Democratic adults.
Charles Gaba, a Democratic health care analyst, has pointed out that the gap is also evident at finer gradations of political analysis: Counties where Trump received at least 70 percent of the vote have an even higher average Covid death toll than counties where Trump won at least 60 percent.
Leonhardt links to my data from mid-October; the graph at the top of this diary has the most up-to-date version of this data as of yesterday:
- New cases are now running 2.9x higher per capita in the reddest tenth of the country than the bluest tenth;
- New deaths are now running 5.8x higher per capita in the reddest tenth.
I should note as an aside that even a completely nonpartisan look at the death rates shows a pretty undeniable trend as well: The COVID death rate since June in the least-vaccinated tenth of the U.S. since June is 4.4x higher than in the most-vaccinated tenth:
As I noted this morning:
It will be fascinating to see how (or if) this pattern changes as time goes on, especially given the two newest factors: 3rd-shot boosters (which I'm not really tracking yet) and the recent approval of the Pfizer vaccine for children 5 - 11 years old. Note that the first batch of fully-vaccinated children won't start showing up in the data/graphs here until around Thanksgiving, since that's when they'll start receiving their second dose.
