Here is an early look at the deadly COVID epidemic Trump accelerated under his administration. How did he do? The United States which pays the most for health care had the 14th highest COVID death rate out of 193 countries coronavirus.jhu.edu/…! Here I show how much Trump’s treatment of COVID resulted in a much higher death rate among Trump voters, aka Republicans, than Biden voters. The dots on the above graph show states’s COVID death rates in 2021 by percent of their vote for Trump in 2020. The only later data I can find includes all the COVID deaths and I am interested in the effect of vaccination. In a couple of months 2022 data should be released and when it is I will post an update. I have excluded five states, four Trump voting states, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, and Wyoming because their low COVID death rate is caused by their very rural populations causing their people to be far enough apart that they were ineffective COVID’s infectors. And their votes are so solidly Republican that even the high COVID death rate will not change who wins their state in the next election. Now New Mexico is the high dot just to the right of the vertical line marking a 37 percent vote for Trump is very high above the line because it has a unique death rate pattern for a democratic voting state. I don’t know what is causing this Democratic voting state to have a state death rate that is much like Republican voting states but it is too much an outlier to include in the analysis.
In looking at state differences Vermont had the lowest 2021 COVID death rate at 40.40 deaths per 100,000, if the total United States had experienced the Vermont rate that year, 282,808 of our 416,893 COVID deaths in 2021, that is 67.8%, that is very close to two out of three, would not have happened. If the United States as a whole had matched Vermont, it would have been about 80th on that list ranking Countries.
I went to ourworldindata.org/… and got state data on COVID vaccination rate and merged it with the states’s 2021 COVID death rates. I then statistically related the vaccination rate to the COVID death rate and found a fairly strong negative relationship, r= -0.70, between vaccination rate and COVID death rate. The reason this relationship is not stronger is that other factors affect COVID infection rates, all states have a large not immunized population that have different rates of exposure to other infected people.
The nature of the relationship, the change in COVID death rate with each percent of the population fully vaccinated was -2.83 deaths per 100,000. Using the statistics to predict the death rates for a hypothetical state with 0% vaccinations produce a 2021 COVID death rate of 313.25 per 100,000 and doing the same for the hypothetical state with 100% vaccinated produced an estimated COVID death rate of 30.06 per 100,000. Now since democratic voting states have fairly high levels of percent Republicans, this estimated about ten to one party difference in death rates must produce vote differences only get applied to the percent of the state voting for each party. I will have to wait for data from the next election to be able to calculate a solid estimate of how many votes Republicans fail to get because of their hight COVID death rate.
