While it fits in nicely with a narrative, I think that's actually a pretty big logical leap. In particular, in the US, which arguably has a right wing populist movement, it is liberal urban areas seem to have been some of the hardest hit.

This is probably explainable by correlations between political leanings and population density, but that's beside the point: Is there real evidence for the claim you are making, or does it just fit in conveniently with your worldview and narrative?

Let's pare it back a bit: There's large per-country variation in the data, and many of the more restrictive measures show significant positive effect in some countries. There is no attempt to control for how successful particular countries were in implementing the policies (which one might code describe as 'non-linear effects,' per the caveats section of the paper).

The US does particularly badly with the more restrictive measures, and has a large segment of the population that denies covid is real and/or anything to worry about. Connecting those dots isn't THAT much of a leap, in the context of an internet forum...

I live in a liberal urban area. We have a ton of right wing people who aren't adhering to even the most basic containment measures. It only takes 50% to 60% of a population to share a certain set of political views for that area to be labeled with said view, but that still leaves a huge portion of the population. And it only takes a relatively small portion of the population ignoring containment measures in order to seriously undermine their effectiveness.

I'm not OP but...

I don't think he's trying to point out a cold hard fact as much as a trend.

Australia has a right wing popularist government but has coped well. Urban areas would always be worst hit, it's a communicable disease.

So there will never be a cold hard law to this.

Agreed.

I find the dishonesty the most annoying. My current right wing popularise government lacks the bravery to be honest and say "fuck it". So they're pretending to do things. Then immediately breaking the rules themselves very publically.

People get the message: "this is serious, wink wink, nudge nudge"