I made this a blog because it seemed too political for the Covid thread and too much Covid for the politics thread.
I was wondering how States were preforming currently managing the spread of Covid-19 right now. And comparing that to who they voted for in 2016. My hypothesis was that, given by now the timing of Covid coming over has normalized and states would have had time to institute whatever localized program they felt was best, states who had a lot of Trump supporters would be having more new cases per 100,000 because those supporters would be less likely to wear masks, social distance or other measures stated by public health since they were getting conflicting advice from the president they voted for. This group of people would exist across the country in all states but smaller percentages where Hilary recieved more.
For the cases per 100,000 I used this interactive map from NPR as well as their color coding described their (blue great, yellow good, orange bad, red real bad (actual descriptions in link))
For States that voted Trump in 2016 as of today they were preforming
Blue = 0% Yellow = 10% Orange = 67% Red = 23%
For States who voted Hilary in 2016 they were preforming
Blue = 5% Yellow = 65% Orange = 30% Red = 0%
This is a very pronounced and dramatic difference. It could also "worse" than the numbers suggest as you would think people who fall in the non believer category would also be less likely to get tested.
But even if we just go with what we have, states who voted Hilary are managing the spread WAY better than states that voted for Trump.
On September 23 2020 11:19 JimmiC wrote: I made this a blog because it seemed too political for the Covid thread and too much Covid for the politics thread.
I was wondering how States were preforming currently managing the spread of Covid-19 right now. And comparing that to who they voted for in 2016. My hypothesis was that, given by now the timing of Covid coming over has normalized and states would have had time to institute whatever localized program they felt was best, states who had a lot of Trump supporters would be having more new cases per 100,000 because those supporters would be less likely to wear masks, social distance or other measures stated by public health since they were getting conflicting advice from the president they voted for. This group of people would exist across the country in all states but smaller percentages where Hilary recieved more.
For the cases per 100,000 I used this interactive map from NPR as well as their color coding described their (blue great, yellow good, orange bad, red real bad (actual descriptions in link))
For States that voted Trump in 2016 as of today they were preforming
Blue = 0% Yellow = 10% Orange = 67% Red = 23%
For States who voted Hilary in 2016 they were preforming
Blue = 5% Yellow = 65% Orange = 30% Red = 0%
This is a very pronounced and dramatic difference. It could also "worse" than the numbers suggest as you would think people who fall in the non believer category would also be less likely to get tested.
But even if we just go with what we have, states who voted Hilary are managing the spread WAY better than states that voted for Trump.
not my opinion but a conservative would probably say something like "the blue states got it first so they had more time to get it together, so to speak."
I would respond that if that was true the peaks would have lasted the same length just started and ended later in the Trump states. I also think it is not "conservatives" that are preforming worse but Trumps brand of rightwing populism that is. When you move to the not trusting science, making everything even facts political version of conservatism, the performance is dramatically worse.
I was wondering when Oklahoma would start getting numbers up, it was only a matter of time. There are a lot of people around here who generally don't wear a mask (except in stores requiring it,) and some establishments have never enforced mask policies.
The red state/blue state covid narrative is a really difficult one to pin down given all the confounding factors, so I think you're too confident in the assertion that blue states are managing things better than red states, especially based on a snapshot of how things are today.
Yes Trump supporters are less likely to follow basic health measures. And yes Republican governors have been on average more reluctant to impose measures such as mandatory mask policies.
However blue states also had larger outbreaks earlier in the year which may result in people there being more cautious, and some proportion of the population being immune. Additionally red and blue states both have predominantly blue cities and red rural areas, with the cities also being hit hard earlier in the pandemic than the redder less dense rural areas. And the weather also seems to have a sizeable effect on the behaviour of people and accordingly the spread of covid which means that during summer heatwaves in the South where everyone stays inside for AC we saw cases surge across the South including California. And it's not as though Trump supporters will act all that differently based on if they live in a red, blue or purple state.
No area in the states especially those hit earlier have higher immunity numbers. There are many states that have passed New York in cases per 100,000 and deaths' per 100,000. If this was any sort of major factor they would now be preforming better not continuing to get worse.
The cautious is certainly a factor but being in N.C. seeing it in NewYork and not thinking it can happen there is crazy. This is an American thing as other countries such as ours have been able to pass this knowledge too each other.
Weather is a issue, but not in the way you seem to think. There is no data that supports that Flu season is in the summer in hot places. Not to mention being inside in AC is not a problem, being inside in large groups too close together is. New Mexico is also not so much cooler than Utah, Oklahoma, Kentucky and so on.
I already discussed that Trump supporters will not act that differently depending on the state but there is more in states that voted for Trump. And many will act differently because of social norming. If you walk into a store with a mask in hand and everyone has on a mask, you will be far more likely to put it on than if no one is. And that is even independent of your own beliefs.
This is the problem with America right now. People make quick assumptions and treat them like facts to explain and discount things.
Too you point that more Trump supporters are rural, it is getting way worse in rural, and instead of this causes people to change behavior as it did in urban centers that are far more challenged when it comes to stopping spread because of density and multifamily housing rates compared to single family homes it is getting worse. Even in the same state, where the weather is the same and so on. So all your reasons suggest that in each state the rural should be doing much better than those cities, but they are not.
The dubious thing is having no methodology, making snap assumptions without thinking them through logically. This leads to people only hearing what confirms what they already believe, confirmation bias.
Many states have passed New York in cases per capita, but New York is still number 2 in deaths per capita (with fellow blue states New Jersey being 1st and Massachusetts being 3rd), so you're just wrong there. There is the argument that treatments have improved which means a lower mortality rate later in the pandemic, but regardless blue states still have the most deaths per capita (so far). Additionally I haven't seen any seroprevalence studies that have shown any area of the US to have more cases than the potentially 20% infected that NY metro hit.
And social norming won't always work in your favour in blue states, since many Trump supporters almost by definition live in very red counties where they will see people not wear masks. Additionally the dynamics of how a virus spreads in urban and rural settings, and your categorization of red and blue states based on the 2016 election are not nearly as straightforward as you seem to think they are. Like Wisconsin has a Democratic governor, but still has one of the worst outbreaks of the country currently. And many of the heavily affected states like Arizona or Florida are purple states more than anything else (albeit with Republican governors).
Confirmation bias is precisely the definition of what you're doing. You're assuming that because Trump supporters engage in 'worse' behaviour vis a vis the pandemic that it means red states will do worse overall than blue states. It's a reasonable assumption in of itself (though throwing things into the bucket of red states and blue states is probably not a great way to look at things), but just looking at which states have the worst outbreaks today and calling that 'evidence' is faulty reasoning.
I should have said counties and not states, I misspoke in the post but this is also why I include sources which explain better and in more detail.
Again you seem confused by my premise, it is Trump voters not dem vs reps. That is why I determined the states not by their governor but by who they voted in 2016. I've also pointed out how if you want to go deeper you can look at counties and specific areas and see the trends continue. For example Austin compared to many of the rural counties in Texas.
Mine is a presumption which I state as much, then I provide data to try to back it up. Yours are a mix of assumptions and presumptions with zero effort to prove and mostly are already countered by both what I have written or by the sources I included.
The point is not that this is perfect and will be right eveytime everywhere. It is that having a president that disagrees with public health orders because of reasons he makes up in his head, will cause his supporters to either belive him or do the same causing the outbreaks to continue where people continue to not follow the protocol.
. Trump could make a big difference with his supporters by telling them to follow public health suggestions and rules. If you trust CEOs more than government doctors this one in Kentucky is begging people too and says it is affecting every age group, non preconditions and not practically no one as Trump is saying with 200k dead and millions of others with likely lifetime long problems.
If you dive into the data, and you try to prove that areas where Trump support is highest they are doing well you will really struggle. So you can believe it is a partisan virus that behaves exceptionally in the USA, or that having a non believer as a head of state, the more vocal the worse, will negatively effect performance.
I'm not arguing that areas with large number of Trump voters are doing well in this pandemic--they aren't, or that Trump's often cavalier attitude towards the pandemic has not resulted in his supporter engaging in unsafe behaviour.
I'm arguing that the evidence you've presented does not adequately establish a causal relationship between red states and the severity of the outbreak there, and that other factors such as the severity of previous outbreaks in those states/counties have to be accounted for, and aren't accounted for by a snapshot of how things are going right now.
Now is what we have, we can check again in a month and see then. Obviously this is not a scientific paper that is going to prove a causal link definitively, if I put in that time and effort I would need a team and I would present it in a journal for peer review. This is a "I wonder if areas where Trump won are preforming worse" " oh shit they are and it is dramatically worse, there is likely something too this,"
How hard they were hit is probably also a factor, I think you misinterpreted that I think this is the only factor. However, you can take all the blue and red states that were hit hard early and still the trend will remain. You can also look outside the US and see that areas that are now doing well have experienced heatwave, low initial peaks, and all the other reasons you came up with and yet they are not preforming even close to as poorly. What is different? Who they trust and who they get their information from.
edit: said in another way. My hypothesis makes sense to not impact other countries in the same way because Trump is American. Your reasoning does not cross borders with any consistency, why not?
None of that is related to more daily infections which is what is being measured.
Edit: I read it as a counter, but if you are making it as an addition that is also likely true that it is likely that more of the Trump voters have died. Especially in the second 100,000 which has happened more in rural.
After reading the book Anti-intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter, nothing from this unchanging group shocks me.
We have States that have designed social services to fail. In Florida, they literally had to work against their own Unemployment system to get it to work.
Texas did a partial closure for less then 30 days and declared a victory on May 1st (?pretty sure?) The President publicly undermined public health measures, leading directly to the stupidest movement in modern politics and life. Anti-maskers.
A rally in a Trump state killed the only black GOP presidential candidate of note in a generation , and they don't give a shit.
It is really, really sad. I really wish we could just be good neighbors and beat this shit. Sorry I don't have anything smart or not obvious to say. Just a real bummer to be part of the largest failure in modern medical history. Meanwhile Vietnam and Korea's citizens .... get to be ... not dead.
All good, it takes a special type of arrogance and stupidity to believe that your corner of the internet is honest people who know the real truth and not the far far far more likely people making shit up and you and your people are just dumb enough to buy the obvious garbage because you sad enough to need to feel special and important in this way. Sometimes they need to be told even if it is simply for cathartic reasons.
The only thing I'll say is that you seem to be operating under a conception of the virus is that it's like... a bunch of cats that are running around and your job is to corral the cats.This is opposed to the conception that it is more like a yearly wildfire that blazes through and runs its course. It sounded to me like the logic of "flatten the curve" was more like the second version, that we can't really control it but we can prevent our hospitals from overloading. And in that respect, we were pretty successful.
I couldn't quite follow the methodology, but it seemed like your rating was based on how the states are doing right now, not how did they do since March. That seems pretty unfair because different states got hit at different times. Texas didn't well and truly get an outbreak until mid-July, and the numbers are rapidly declining as we speak. Again, the virus runs its course.
On another note, I'm from that area that the article talks about, and it's basically the Mos Eisley Cantina of Texas. I would complain about corruption if the incompetence wasn't so overwhelming. Back in March, when the Covid cases were in the dozens, the tinpot dictators creamed themselves taking as much power as they could, enacting such heroic efforts as ripping up concrete park tables. It's also probably one of the worst places for obesity and diabetes in the country if not the world. I also didn't hear anything about restricting border traffic, which was having its own outbreak at the same time.
On September 23 2020 15:36 ZigguratOfUr wrote: Many states have passed New York in cases per capita, but New York is still number 2 in deaths per capita (with fellow blue states New Jersey being 1st and Massachusetts being 3rd), so you're just wrong there.
Legit /endthread but people seem to have moved on from actual deaths to cases.Even though with the massive uptick in cases and still far fewer deaths (partly due to democrat governers no longer sending COVID positive old folks back to nursing homes, partly due to more testing and possible mutation of virus into weaker form) the death rate per x cases for COVID continues to decline.
Although ill say if Covid-19 had killed 200 million Americans like Joe Biden seems to think it has maybe I wouldn't see this thread as blatant fearmongering...
EPT
