I have found that there are certain things around the house that remind me of the early days of the pandemic, like the smell of a hand soap I used every half-hour, or certain weather that evokes those early days in the spring of 2020 when even going outside seemed as if it might pose a risk.
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It was probably different here in New York, where cases first surged without detection. It wasn’t clear then what was happening or how the virus spread or how to treat it. It wasn’t even clear how many people were infected, given the limited testing that accompanied the country’s initial scramble. Hundreds of people died each day in New York City during one stretch. The chirp of birds emerging into the warming weather was drowned out by ambulances.
New Yorkers and America broadly figured a lot out after that: How to measure cases. How to treat patients. Vaccine was developed and, slowly, made available to everyone older than 12. Now we know how to prevent the worst effects: Get vaccinated but still wear a mask indoors where case numbers are surging. New York learned those lessons. About 80 percent of the adult population has received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine; 72 percent have received both. Only 54 out of every million state residents have died of covid-19 since June 1, compared with 135 deaths out of a million nationally.
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In other states, these lessons didn’t take. The pandemic, as has been noted repeatedly, is now heavily centered in states with lower vaccination rates. The arrival of the delta variant of the virus has caused surges in new infections and deaths, but not everywhere. Because those surges tend to overlap with states that vote more heavily Republican, including in last year’s election, there’s been a furious debate over whether politics has played a role in this ongoing fourth wave of cases.
Writing for the National Review, Charles Cooke lamented how the pandemic has been approached.
“Vaccines help a great deal. That much we know,” he wrote Monday. “Beyond that, though, the coverage of the virus has mostly been partisanship and witchcraft.”
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Well, no. We also know that wearing masks reduces the spread of the virus, as does avoiding crowded indoor spaces. But those recommendations are much more politically loaded, given that they lead to things such as mandates for wearing masks in schools or limiting occupancy at restaurants and concert venues. Those recommendations lead, in other words, to the sorts of things that Republican elected officials have taken great pains to ostentatiously oppose, at the urging of their bases. Cooke slips past them.
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To muddy the question of how politics and the pandemic intermingle, he then points to the current population-adjusted death toll from the virus, showing that two blue states, New Jersey and New York, have been hit hardest.
“Try as you might,” he declared, “you will not find a plausible way of blaming this on that party or region or policy that you hate.”
Well, one thing you could try is an accurate representation of the numbers over time. Like this, showing cumulative deaths as a function of population each month.
Here you see a few things. One is that there has been a recent uptick in deaths in red states. The other is that states such as New Jersey and New York are at the top of the listings because of those early surges last year.
In other words, New Jersey is essentially being identified as inept in its handling of the virus because it, like New York, was slammed by the invisible enemy before we knew how it spread — or even that it was spreading. Before we learned how to prevent it and how to treat it. It’s a bit like anointing a new NFL rushing champion once you decide to include yards gained in Pee Wee football.
The peak of the first wave of the virus arrived on April 10, 2020. If we exclude deaths from that wave, roughly looking at May 1 as an initial boundary, given the delay between cases and deaths, the picture of the pandemic shifts.
I will be the first to admit that it is not fair to say that New York and New Jersey were not as hard hit if you simply remove the deaths from the months where the most deaths occurred. Those states — my state — did see a lot of coronavirus-related deaths, and state leaders did make obvious mistakes. (One obvious one: New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) bringing coronavirus patients back to nursing homes, though it’s not clear how many deaths might have resulted from that decision.)
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Treating a death in New York in April 2020 as functionally equivalent to a death in Florida in August 2021 is simply dishonest. The vast majority of deaths occurring now are preventable in a way that was absolutely not the case 16 months ago.
Since the pandemic began, there have been about as many deaths as a function of population in blue states as in red states. But that’s only because of the big increase in red-state deaths recently, especially in Florida, which in the past three months has tallied 327 deaths per million residents. Since May 1, 2020, there have consistently been more deaths in red states as a function of population than blue states since last summer.
Cooke’s defense was largely centered on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), who has fought hard against mask mandates and has pinned his reelection bid (and potential 2024 presidential candidacy) on rejecting containment measures. But if we look at deaths as a function of state leadership — which party holds the governor’s seat — red states actually perform worse than on the 2020 presidential-vote metric.
Since May of this year, more than half of the deaths from covid have been in states that voted for Donald Trump. There have been 239 deaths per million among red-state residents, compared with 150 per million in blue states. Those numbers are roughly the same when looking at the party holding the governor’s mansion.
Cooke is right about one cause: vaccination rates. On this metric, red states obviously fare worse. States that voted more heavily for Trump last year have lower vaccination rates — and often more negative effects from the current surge in coronavirus cases.
How much of a difference does being vaccinated make? Data compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation assessing cases in which vaccinated individuals nonetheless contracted an infection show how rarely that occurs.
Vaccination does work — but vaccination is also correlated to politics.
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Cooke’s broader point is that some states with prevention measures such as mask mandates have seen bad surges and some states without have been fine. This is true. It is also true that, even when looking at the growth in cases since May 2020, there are several blue states in the top tier. States in the Sun Belt were hit hard last summer, too, thanks to the weather pushing people inside to seek air conditioning — that needs to be considered.
It is also true that, particularly since that first surge last year, more people have died relative to population in red states than in blue ones. It is true that the death toll has been worse in states with Republican governors than in states with Democratic ones, particularly recently. It’s also true that Republicans in particular are less likely to get vaccinated and more likely to reject efforts to contain the virus, such as mask-wearing — sentiments that are, to various degrees, reflected back to them from Republican leaders far more often than Democratic ones. Cooke points to Oregon’s struggle with the virus. The county where the case count is the highest at the moment is Douglas County — which voted for Trump by a 38-point margin last year. Somehow, its residents aren’t heeding coronavirus recommendations from Gov. Kate Brown (D).
It is true, though, that a look at the per-capita death totals by state since March of 2020 don’t show a pattern correlated to the governor’s party. Extrapolating from that to the idea that politics and political leadership are necessarily unrelated to where we are now is obviously flawed.