The average Republican is 50 and the average Democrat is 47. I don’t think there will be a huge difference in coronavirus impact.

Source: https://www.debt.org/faqs/americans-in-debt/economic-demogra...

It's not the average that's important, it is the percentage above 70 and 80 years that is the important factor.

That article is from 2008. A lot has changed since.

The first thing that I would draw your attention to is that social shifts have moved the "silent generation" from being evenly split Democrat/Republican in 2004 to going for Trump by a 13 point margin in 2016. This is the group that will suffer the vast majority of fatalities. See https://www.people-press.org/2016/09/13/2-party-affiliation-... for verification.

Secondly, women lean Democratic, men Republican. (The same link verifies that.) Most casualties will be men. See https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se... for verification.

Third, the upcoming generations through that 12 years are overwhelmingly Democratic and will have almost no deaths from this disease. Both previous links verify that.

The result is that, a well researched article from a dozen years ago notwithstanding, the impact of COVID-19 are likely to disproportionately hit Republicans over Democrats.

(Not necessarily. The one trend that Republicans can hope for is that diseases spread through urban areas and urban areas are overwhelmingly Democratic. I don't think that this offsets the other phenomena though.)

Cities skew democrat, particularly inner-cities. Those built-up areas are also more vulnerable to the spread of disease.

That's unclear, actually. The biggest single US cluster so far is in a retirement community in suburban Seattle. No one is safe here, novel viruses like this simply transmit too easily.

> Where democrats have been cancelling travel and buying toilet paper, republicans didn't even believe the crisis was real until the market crashed.

Don’t spread partisan bullshit.

There's literally a poll elsewhere in this thread showing exactly this kind of effect.

I mean, fine, it's a partisan point. But... I mean, seriously: at what point does it become OK to point out that Fox News and the Republican leadership[1] just plain fucked up the response to COVID-19 really badly? And that they seemingly did so out of a combination of both ignorance and partisan desire to minimize the problem?

Is that not OK? Because it's a real point, and one that needs to be made (and heard by republican voters), even if it's "partisan".

[1] And specifically Fox News and the Republican leaders, and not the "MSM" or Democratic leadership, who were saying opposite things and in hindsight were clearly correct.

That was in 2012. The data is way outdated. The vast majority of young voters nowadays are swaying democrat.

Now, assuming:

- old people vote in far larger proportion compared to young folks

- they tend to vote conservative

- this virus is likely to kill old people disproportionately

- red states tend to do less well in terms of all kinds of infrastructure, including medical

...then would you expect to see a change in the results of future elections?

Do you think this won't hurt urban areas worse than rural ones, where the liberal voting blocs are concentrated?

Suburbs are the best place to be.

My mom drives 90 minutes a day to be with my dad in nursing home rehabilitation, the closest facility. The normal response time for an ambulance is 20 minutes, plus 30-45m to an ER. Their doctors are a similar distance. Note that the ambulance is volunteer, and the average member is 55. They live in NY, in a county with a decent sized city. It’s worse in the real boonies.

I live in a city, a paramedic will be at your door in 7-10m. Hospital 5-10m, etc.

If this gets bad, everyone will be familiar with tragedy. The urban stories will be about neglected patients in overcrowded wards and people who die of untreated strokes, etc. The rural tragedies will be finding grandma, drowned in her own phlegm because sick relatives and travel restrictions isolated her from support.

> Suburbs are the best place to be.

I'm pretty sure I'd rather be homesteading off-grid in a remote wilderness or on a sailboat than in an average American suburb through all this.

It's an interesting question. Urban areas, it would seem, are likely to get the spread a lot faster, but they also have way better medical infrastructure. It will spread slower in rural areas, but you have way fewer hospital beds, and less medical infrastructure in general.

The US's rural healthcare is really bad. I was in a very rural part of Ohio recently and was listening to people talk about how they really only have an urgent care facility nearby but the closest hospital is a decent bit away. Even then they talked about how it wasn't a good hospital and recounted horror stories of friends/family and how they always go to a further/different hospital because they don't get good care at the closer one (which again, is not that close).

I live (urban/suburban) in spitting distance of 3-4+ hospitals (I don't even know for sure) with at least 2 of those being ones I would trust my life to in a heartbeat (the others I just don't know enough about). I was really unaware of the disconnect before that trip and it didn't really occur to me that hospital != hospital. So not only do some rural location have limited or no hospitals but they don't trust the ones they do have.

It also doesn't help that Trump is still keeping up his cult rallies and still has one scheduled next week.

The current White House is essentially the worst case scenario in dealing with this outbreak and is going to get people killed. There is still current exponential growth in the USA, and there is near zero testing going on due to incompetence and coverup. Things are going to get much worse.

Downvote all you want, but these are facts.

I didn't downvote, but the politicization is unhelpful. When Trump pondered travel restrictions to/from China a month ago, the media jumped at him for being racist/isolationist. All the "experts" explained us that open borders are necessary to fight an epidemic.

Which legitimate person would ever say open borders help an epidemic? The virus spreading as it is a direct bad side-effect of globalization such as it is.

The main issue right now is the lack of testing and covering up just to try and bump the stock market, and it obviously is having the opposite effect since the problem is just getting worse the longer the problem is ignored.

The WHO's official guidance in late January was that countries should not restrict travel to fight the coronavirus. Travel restrictions "cause more harm than good by hindering info-sharing, medical supply chains and harming economies", they said.

Maybe we should ring up Italy?

In the latter case, property prices might drop as children inherit properties of departed elderly.

Property values will fall after the next recession. It looks very likely that this set off what will become the next recession. (I mean, a recession is two quarters, so it hasn't happened yet... but it seems really unlikely to me that we won't see a recession, considering.)

People can be transported from rural areas to urban hospitals..

The next question is, will they. I know of a town in Indiana where a surprising number of people don't get medical help. Some of it is money, but a big part is cultural. Indianapolis scares them. I dare say, for too many Indianapolis is scarier than COVID-19.

Depends on the disease.

Something like a stroke requires immediate action (say, within 2 hours) to be able to use the best treatments available. Living very far away from a good hospital makes your survival chances quite lower.

For Covid-19, as far as I read, some people have gone to the hospital (already having trouble to breath) and died after a few hours. But those seem extreme cases. Normally you would have a couple days to go to the hospital from the moment you realize something is odd.

Life flights put most rural places in the US within those time bounds.

Yes, but those bounds are not binary. The faster you arrive, the higher the chance survival (specially for things like strokes, arriving in 30 minutes is way better than in 2 hours).

Then there is the issue of cost for that flight and the poor state of healthcare.

The quality of medical infrastructure is going to play a small role in outcomes when the entire system is overwhelmed many times over in the next month or so.

No. You misunderstood the OPs premise.

Everyone will come in contact with the virus. People under 50 years old (as recent reports have stated) have a high chance of survival. The deaths from it will mostly be from those 50 years and old. Voters who are 50 years and older largely vote for the Republican party.

Not if you avoid other people.

Republicans are older on average, but they also live in less densely-populated places. The most dangerous thing I can think of is commuting on public transportation. That's a feature of cities, predominately Democratic strongholds.

There is a poll that said that Democrats are taking it much more seriously than Republicans:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-po...

Irony.

They are incapable of occupying the same position at the same time. It's ridiculous. Pure tribalism at work.

"Initially the left was saying flu was a bigger threat. Now they are taking it seriously, shutting down events.

Initially the right was taking it seriously, banning travel. Now they are calling it the flu."

https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1237241527035928576

> They are incapable of occupying the same position at the same time. It's ridiculous. Pure tribalism at work.

That's not really what GP's poll indicates:

> About four of every 10 Democrats said they thought the new coronavirus poses an imminent threat, compared to about two of every 10 Republicans.

Both less than half.

Most republicans were successfully programmed to believe what Trump tells them, which as of today is a mix of underestimation of the risks and then dodging responsibilities.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/fact-checking-...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/04/us/politics/coronavirus-t...

I ran the numbers for Florida. Unless Imm way off it was only a 1-2 year difference of the existing aging out.

The vote tally there in 2016 was 4,605,515 (49.1%) to 4,485,745 (47.8%), though. And other swing states were even closer.

Similarly the UK health minister has just tested positive for it. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51827356

Parliament has sat today, without her, so it's still quite possible that others will catch it.

Junior health minister. I think she is in charge of a subsection of areas, but she is not THE health minister from what I've read.

Yes, she is one of four ministers underneath the health secretary. Care is not in her portfolio luckily (she is responsible for mental health and patient experience).

On the other hand, "Parasite Prevalence Predicts Authoritarianism" [1]. Which wouldn't necessarily swing the election obviously one way or the other (left or right, Democrat or Republican -- although my gut tells me it would swing things to the right to some degree), but could definitely be a confounding factor to the above theory.

1 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3641067/

That's a bit of a stretch...there are probably dozens of other obvious correlations in places where authoritarianism pops up, because authoritarianism is much more likely to spring up where people are poor and uneducated...

Republicans may be marginally older, but they are also more rural. Presumably cities would be harder hit with a pandemic, but then again city folk might have easier access to care. It's really hard to say.

Beyond direct consequences, it seems reasonable that covid19 would affect the election by tanking the economy and giving Trump nothing to point at as his big accomplishments

In fact, most virus infections hit harder over 50.

Funnily enough, the second in charge of the Spanish far-rightwing party Vox who accused immigrants of bringing diseases like HIV (sic), has just been diagnosed positive after the party gathering on 8th March (intentionally on Women's day). Honestly, everything looks like a fun/scary/dystopic meme these days.

What is your reasoning?

It's right there in their post... older voting population combined with taking fewer precautions against the virus. Both mean it might have a larger affect on the republican block.

Personally I'm not sure if it will outweigh how democrats are more likely to live in denser urban areas where spread is faster.

Parent edited his post without noting the edit. Prior to the edit it did not include any information except that republicans would be more largely effected.

They are watching Fox News and listening to the chief executive, who keep telling them "this is fine, as you were".

I myself am not worried, but I AM worried about my Fox News watching elderly parents. They are in danger the most. Also, mis-informed.

This is how years of denial, spin, propaganda, lying, and gaslighting end up being. In fact - deadly.

I'm curious how Fox News chose to push for denial rather than, say blaming it on international or ideological opponents.

Perhaps it's just that they can change course without any pushback from their demographic -- they're happy believing that we've always been at war with Eastasia. Still, it must cost them something to be quite so demonstrably wrong on something that's so much in people's faces. (As opposed to, say, climate change, where the effects are much slower and more easily shuffled under "the heat wave and fires are just weather".)

You know Democrats (media and Schumer's tweet) immediately accused Trump of sinophobia when he (appropriately) shut down travel with China?

This is really not the time for petty partisan politics. Both parties are propaganda machines. It is the nature of the two party system.

You mean Mexico. He wanted to shut the border with MEXICO, for no apparent practical reason, and refused at first to let Americans off a cruise ship, because he wanted to "keep the numbers low".

No, I mean China. I personally witnessed the tweet before it was deleted.

>https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/chuck_schumer_q...

I think it's 33% distrust in governmental institutions, especially the liberal elite fake news CDC, 33% the fact that it's mostly hit large cities so far, and 33% the direct actions of the administration and the right wing media machine.

I think the fact that it's an election year, more people are susceptible to thinking the pandemic is overblown and thus a conspiracy to defeat Trump.

Uncle Joe is 77 years old vs Trump 74

And Bernie is 78. There should really be age limits for government, especially given how much we now know about cognitive decline.

A lot of individual differences in terms of cognitive decline.

ruth bader ginsburg is 86 years old, and still seems sharp as a tack.

>and still seems sharp as a tack

That's highly subjective and no doubt any assessment is likely to strongly align with partisanship.

Which is why we need age limits. You can't expect people to objectively evaluate whether those inside or outside their party are still legislating or judging effectively in their 80s. Obviously most Republicans would lean towards arguing that she's senile and most Democrats would lean toward the opposite.

And then I imagine cognitive decline does not affect all faculties equally - so someone may still, say, have no trouble writing essays, but their judgement may be compromised.

People who cannot appreciate exponential growth are at a higher risk than people who do simply because behavior matters.