A few days ago, in my morning perusal of The New York Times list of Covid-19 statistics by state, I noticed that the top ten in daily per capita cases, averaged over the last seven days, made up most of the Confederacy. In order they are: Mississippi, Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, South Carolina, and Texas. Of the ten, all were recognized by the Confederate government as part of the Confederacy, though Kentucky was never formally recognized by the Union as being in rebellion. In Kentucky, a border slave-holding state, seditionists formed a shadow government and issued a secession act, which the Confederacy recognized. In any case, the top ten Covid states make up most of the eleven or thirteen (depending on how you count Kentucky and Missouri) states in the Confederacy.
As it happens, the bottom eleven states in the list remained part of the Union. They are in order: New York, Minnesota, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Michigan, Vermont, Maryland, Connecticut, and Maine. Maryland, a former slave-holding state, is considered a border state, but it never seceded from the Union. These bottom eleven made up most of the Union.
What that means is that all the states that weren’t states at the time of the Civil War are in between the top ten and bottom eleven. A few states diverge from the pattern, notably Virginia, which is thirty-third on the list, and Oregon, which is fifteenth on the list. Nonetheless, this pattern has held up for a few days. What, if anything, does it indicate?
I can’t offer a detailed sociological analysis of why, for the moment, the rise of Covid-19 infections seems to break along historical lines. My only point is that the spread of Covid-19, most prominent where people are rebelling against masks and vaccines, reflects deep structures of feeling and belief that are rooted in history, whether people are aware of them or not. I leave it to more knowledgeable people to make of these structures what they will.