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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Holliday1881" data-source="post: 409019" data-attributes="member: 1292">Here's more for the Raggie Peasant:[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.yahoo.com/news/covid-gets-even-redder-191319465.html[/URL]New York TimesCOVID Gets Even RedderBut it turned out that these differences largely offset each other in 2020 — or maybe they didn’t matter as much as some people assumed. Either way, the per capita death toll in blue America and red America was similar by the final weeks of 2020.It was only a few percentage points higher in counties where Donald Trump had won at least 60% of the vote than in counties where Joe Biden crossed that threshold. In counties where neither candidate won 60%, the death toll was higher than in either Trump or Biden counties. There simply was not a strong partisan pattern to COVID during the first year that it was circulating in the United States.Then the vaccines arrived.They proved so powerful, and the partisan attitudes toward them so different, that a gap in COVID’s death toll quickly emerged.The gap in COVID’s death toll between red and blue America has grown faster over the past month than at any previous point.In October, 25 out of every 100,000 residents of heavily Trump counties died from COVID, more than three times higher than the rate in heavily Biden counties (7.8 per 100,000). October was the fifth consecutive month that the percentage gap between the death rates in Trump counties and Biden counties widened.Some conservative writers have tried to claim that the gap may stem from regional differences in weather or age, but those arguments fall apart under scrutiny. (If weather or age were a major reason, the pattern would have begun to appear last year.) The true explanation is straightforward: The vaccines are remarkably effective at preventing severe COVID, and almost 40% of Republican adults remain unvaccinated, compared with about 10% of Democratic adults.</blockquote>

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