What is Happening with the Partisan Covid Death Rate Gap?
I'd like to show you a fascinating graph. In fact, I'll show it to you a few times! It shows the number of people in the U.S. who died each day from Covid-19, since the pandemic took hold here in April 2020 until today. And it breaks them down by political party. Have a look: I want to talk about the partisan gap in Covid-19 death rates in the U.S.. It has a wild history of flips, spikes, growth and shrinkage. At the moment I write, the gap remains significant, but is much reduced from where it was in 2021. Why is that? And will it swell again, or disappear? Is partisanship literally killing people? And could it be that a reduction in partisanship over Covid responses is, counter to expectations, leading to more deaths, not fewer? The graph above comes from an article published in February of 2022 in the NY Times , written by David Leonhardt. I've color coded the multiple Covid waves for clarity. A quick overview shows this: during the first wave, when the world went i...