Trump voters & COVID Deaths part 2
Yesterday’s post looked at an NPR article’’s contention that COVID deaths were associated with a US County’s tendency to vote for Trump in the 2020 election. In that post, I highlighted that the numbers look quite different when drilling into smaller periods of time…. what looked like a strong signal of Trump voters→ more COVID deaths was largely just a function of the fact that the time period the authors used coincided with the Summer seasonal wave that hit the Southern states hard, where lots of Trump voters live.
Today, Alex Berenson mentions a NYT piece that treads along the same theme as the NPR piece. Alex rightly brings up the point that counties with large numbers of Trump voters are generally quite a bit older than counties with few Trump voters. Fortuitously, I Numero Reader of the Month ianbot helped me yesterday by pointing to a source of age bracketed population numbers by US County so I could look into the effect of age as well.
Here’s my approach:
For each US County, I labeled it a Biden county or a Trump county based on who received more votes
For each state, I calculated the total population in Biden counties vs Trump counties, as well as the % of population in those counties >75 years old, and the COVID deaths per 100k. Grouping by state allows us to largely ignore seasonality because each state will roughly experience the same seasonal trend.
Since we know ~60% of COVID deaths are among the 75+ year olds, it would only make sense that counties with a higher % of population >75 would experience higher COVID deaths per 100k.
In the table below, I look at the ratio of % of >75 year olds in Trump counties vs. Biden counties within a state. I then look at the ratio of COVID deaths per 100K in Trump counties vs Biden counties. Finally, I compare those two ratios to see if Trump counties (adjusting for 75+ aged population) appear to die at higher or lower rates than Biden counties. Walking through in an example will help:
Illinois
6.5% of population in counties that voted for Biden are >75, while 8.6% of population in counties that voted for Trump are >75, yielding a ratio of 1.3
There have been 214 COVID deaths per 100K in counties that voted for Biden, while 291 in counties voting for Trump, yielding a ratio of 1.4
From this, we might say that counties voting for Trump (adjusting for 75+ aged population) died of COVID at a rate (1.4/1.3 )-1= 8% higher than those in Biden counties.
Note that in some states, all or nearly all counties voted for one candidate. If the total population in counties voting for either candidate is <100K people, I do not calculate the ratios. Those states are colored blue (overwhelmingly Biden) or red (overwhelmingly Trump)
The yellow column furthest right shows whether within a given state the Trump counties (after adjusting for 75+ population) look to have more (positive number) or less (negative number) COVID deaths per 100k than the Biden counties. After removing the states that overwhelmingly supported one candidate, we are left with 38 states for comparison:
17 states showed an increased COVID death rate in Trump voting counties
15 states showed an increased COVID death rate in Biden voting counties
The median difference in death rate among the states between Trump voting counties and Biden voting counties was 0.
What you've done here is really, really cool. Thank you!
I couldn't help noticing that county-wide obesity rates are also available...I'm guessing these challenge the vaccine efficacy narrative even further:
https://www.countyhealthrankings.org/explore-health-rankings/measures-data-sources/county-health-rankings-model/health-factors/health-behaviors/diet-exercise/adult-obesity
How sad that it's come to this. What a scurrilous attempt by NPR and NYT to sow division and hatred. And to use people's deaths to score cheap points. This is a zero sum game that leads to nothing. Tic-tac-toe using people's lives as noughts and crosses on the board.
It is important that you demonstrated how futile this is by reaching the number you did. A hollow zero. Death is the equaliser. All people die. There is no red or blue. No left or right. I hope that people see this and reflect deeply.
The suffering and division must end and people need to start heeding each other. To not allow our fears to distort our reasoning or direct our actions to inflict harm. Covid may have started the dying, but we don't need to continue it. It is hubris to try to defeat death by means which we do not fully understand.
The idea of America is still important to the world. We need you to transcend this. So much hangs in the balance, for all of us. I hope that you all show up at the march in Washington and demonstrate to the world what you are made of.