A Sociological Eye

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...

This is a map of confirmed Covid-19 cases in Milwaukee on Saturday, March 28th, 2020. Take a look. Keeping that image in mind, I want you to look at another city view. Milwaukee is an extremely segregated city. Here is a map of where people of different races and ethnicities live in the area, as of the last U.S. Census (each tiny green dot represents an African American person, each blue dot represents a white person, each orange dot a Latine person, and each red dot an Asian individual): Look what happens if we superimpose these (sorry about the quality of this quick image layering): Just by eyeballing one map laid over the other, you can see that areas populated by people of color are heavily overlaid by confirmed Covid-19 case dots. Then look at the very white suburbs outside the central city. On the north shore, Fox Point--with a population that is 96% white--contains just two tiny confirmed case dots. Bayside, 91% white, has one confirmed case. To the south, we ...