The argument I am criticizing never mentions rearward metrics as a problem.
The assumption that friends and family will calmly watch a family member’s untended death from covid when ICUs are over capacity and that essential workers will continue to show up for work knowing there is no hope for care if they fall ill is unrealistic in my opinion.
Are 200,000 lives meaningful enough?
Silver's regression model shows that for each 1% increase in the vote share for the blue candidate, the covid death rate in that state (statistically) would fall by 15.5 per million population.
In areas where the blue candidate received 20% of the vote, and the red candidate received 80%, the model predicts 1,793 deaths per million.
And in areas where blue got 80% and red got 20%, the model predicts 864 deaths per million.
A 300% greater death rate [1] is a startlingly high penalty to pay for an ideology. This is at least 200,000 deaths [2] attributed to political ideology. Not to mention the tremendous excess suffering that did not result in death.
And, no, it's not because red areas are older than blue areas. It's because red ideologues got the vaccine in far lower numbers.
[1] Coefficients show that blue at 0% would have a death rate of 2,103 per million, and blue at 100% would have a death rate of 554 per million.
[2] 2,103 - 554 = 1,549 excess deaths per million for red, multiplied by 45% of the US population is roughly 230,000.
Pretty sure it was something like 60% vs 70%. That doesn't seems like anywhere near different enough to explain those numbers.
Vaccine refusal played a part, certainly, in connection with the fact that conservatives are older. In many instances, a lot older. In other instances, not really that much older. The trend is unidirectional but the degree varies by state, as you'll find when you start comparing West Virginia and Florida to Maine and Vermont.
But the truth is inescapable: the older someone was, the more they needed to get vaccinated and boosted... and the less likely they did.
*The differences in state death rates are very likely because of differences in vaccine uptake*
Just to be clear, I don’t mean to imply that COVID is intrinsically more likely to target Republicans or anything like that. Rather, my claim is that COVID is considerably more deadly in people who haven’t been vaccinated, and since Republicans are less likely to be vaccinated than Democrats, state partisanship serves as a proxy for this.
Indeed, we can look at vaccination directly.
... age and vaccination rates alone explain more than half of the variation in COVID death rates between states since Feb. 2021.
Right-wing media figures consistently fed their audience a diet of vaccine skepticism, conspiracy theories, and promotion of useless alternative treatments; e.g., https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/17/us/politics/coronavirus-v... . Because their audience skews older, this messaging had unusually-deadly consequences.
Why there's anything controversial about any of this, I have no clue. How does it make sense for him to write "I don't mean to say that COVID targets Republicans," followed by a paragraph that states exactly why it does?
The point of that statement is, the virus doesn't target someone because they're a Republican, but Republicans have been more likely to die from it because they're more likely to be unvaccinated.
It's very easy to make decisions in retrospect when you have all the information that could be useful. It's very hard to make decisions in the present when that information doesn't exist yet.