Red Covid: How Politics Changed the Course of a Pandemic
Has there ever been a health threat studied, measured, documented, and reviewed to the extent of Covid-19? The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) records daily figures by state for new cases, total cases, new deaths, and total deaths, looking for causes, trends, correlations, and patterns. A CDC table online included over 50,000 lines of data as of June 10, 2022. Further data is available by age, race and gender.
From the beginning of the pandemic the illness and death caused by the virus was unevenly distributed by both demography and geography. Earliest U.S. cases were in cities that featured prominently in international travel – the Northeast and the West Coast – areas associated with more liberal populations and Democratic party affiliation. Death rates were higher for Black and Latino Americans, populations with lower incomes and jobs that were considered “essential.”
On December 14, 2020, the first vaccine doses for Covid-19 were administered in the U.S. Initially white and Asian Americans were quicker to receive vaccinations than were Black and Latino Americans, populations that already had limited access to healthcare. An exception among white Americans were Republican voters, who more often opposed being vaccinated, compared to Democratic or independent voters, despite evidence of the vaccinations’ effectiveness.
Higher death rates for Black and Latino Americans persisted into early 2021. However, between mid-2021 and mid-2022 that situation flipped, with death rates for white Americans higher than rates for Black and Latino Americans. Data from those CDC records reveal the history of these changes.
Using Covid-19 deaths by state for June 30, 2020, and for June 10, 2022, I separated the states into two groups: states that voted for Donald Trump in 2020, and states that voted for Joe Biden in 2020. I’ll call them Red states and Blue states. By June 30, 2020, over 100,000 deaths had been recorded in the U.S. since the beginning of the year. The death rate for Blue states was 43.3 per 100,000, and for Red states 18.9 per 100,000. At that point in time, before vaccinations were available, higher death rates had occurred in more urbanized, higher density states, predominantly Blue states.
The more recent data, for June 10, 2022, reveals the full impact of vaccination. Total deaths by then had passed one million. The death rate for Blue states reached 216 per 100,000. For Red states the rate was 312, or 44% higher than Blue states. According to surveys by the Kaiser Family Foundation and others, political partisanship remains a stronger predictor of whether someone is vaccinated than demographic factors such as age, race, level of education, or insurance status.