Excess Death Rates for Republicans and Democrats During the Covid-19 Pandemic
nber.org
nber.org
Or perhaps they simply didn't want to take drugs pushed by people who actively hate them and demean them at every opportunity.
Or possibly they're aware of the tendency of governments the world over to use emergencies to seize power, as has undeniably been done here.
Or maybe they believe in their own version of "my body, my choice".
Possibly also they don't want to take scientific advice on people who suddenly insist that boys can be girls, and that anyone who disagrees should be banished from society.
It's foolish to think one party "owns" science, and natural that people would bristle when dictated to by perhaps the smarmiest smuggies that have ever existed on the planet.
Or perhaps they didn’t want to take drugs pushed by people they actively hate and demean at every opportunity.
> perhaps the smarmiest smuggies that have ever existed on the planet
Whelp, that didn't take long.
Also, as you're no doubt aware, calling someone "smug" and calling someone a Russian-backed Nazi science-denier (and then trying to get them fired and/or prosecuted) are very, very different.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?type=all&query=author%3Amansion7
Summoning mass false reporting brigades to destroy the livelihoods of innocent people is not.
I can't help that it's mostly one side doing it. Perhaps if it were less blatantly obvious, people would stop noticing it.
If you "trust" science, you're just being religious. The people who don't just immediately take the words of the CDC or WHO at face value are more scientific than the people who do.
Science is full of trust. Science is rarely replicated from first principles. There just isn't time. The further away one gets from one's own field, the more one relies on the experts in that field.
People who mistrust the CDC and WHO, but accept anything about physics, chemistry, or anything else that isn't their specific area of research, aren't being "skeptical". They're just being ideologically biased, affirming their preconceptions without applying that same skepticism to the theories that support their ideologies.
The overwhelming number of virologists, epidemiologists, doctors, and public health experts listen to what the CDC and WHO says because they do know what they're talking about. And they listen as the information changes, because they change their minds when the data available changes. What do you do?
I take their words with a grain of salt just like with anyone else.
Blind trust in science is no different from religious worship.
It is utterly impossible to "think for yourself" when it comes to modern science. To fully understand the thinking and evidence that goes into some of these statements might take decades. You should trust it because all parts of the chain of arguments are being critically looked at by experts all the time.
If you distrust scientists just like you distrust priests, it is your blind distrust that's deeply irrational (under the guise of rationality no less).
Medicine is demonstrably saving lives year on year. Some plagues have been entirely eliminated; for others we're on the verge of stamping them out.
Medicine is a more complex science than physics or chemistry, with more variables leading to more room for errors. But nobody seemed to think medicine was political until it coincided with a political ideology that happened to have a penchant for declaring sciences "political" whenever they didn't want to accept them.
If you want to give Trump credit for the vaccine, you need to give him credit for sabotaging and deliberately undermining the effort as well. Trump is the reason the next pandemic is going to be far worse than it needs to be, because thanks to him, anti-vaxx conspiracy belief has been normalized and half the US has made mistrust of science and refusal to vaccinate a fundamental part of their political and cultural identity.
But yes, he got the vaccine completed in record time. Kudos to him for that.
https://time.com/4711764/donald-trump-pretend-truck-photo-wh...
Dont let yourself be fooled by the lamestream media, he wasnt pretending, he really drove that truck, actually a bigger one that that. The biggest truck anyone had ever driven.
"Hey, FDA, Pfizer, etc - I want this vaccine in x months make it work and shout if anyone gives you trouble."
I'd imagine coming from any president that would carry some weight.
And this fits my world view and comes to a conclusion I agree with so it's clearly "science".
> Post-vaccines, the excess death rate gap between Republicans and Democrats widened from 1.6 pp (22% of the Democrat excess death rate) to 10.4 pp (153% of the Democrat excess death rate). The gap in excess death rates between Republicans and Democrats is concentrated in counties with low vaccination rates and only materializes after vaccines became widely available.
You need to control for co-mordibities too.
Also, people tend to become more conservative as they age (its a fact) so you should expect Republicans to be older than Democrats on average. Garbage study?
The parties are big tent enough that age structure differences disappear thanks to the law of big numbers.
It's hard to see how it would be worse if we hadn't "Saved the NHS".
However, our response still lacked 'localization' (if you have another word, be my guest), and would've been better if hospitals in less impacted areas weren't also stepping down on consultations/operations after the initial surge. My cousin from eastern France sent more than 50 patients to western France, and 8 in Germany during the two weeks following the lockdowns, so I'm not saying it was a bad idea at first, but after the first wave, we could have adapted better.
The issue is that everything is politicized now, i don't like the government much but i am able to say they reacted well in some regards (and the administration was surprisingly competent and effective, i worked with them at the time and in time of crisis, it's night and day), and fucked things up in other.
Also people choose weird hills do die on. If you're wrong, you're wrong. You might have had circumstances why, and maybe you're only 50% wrong, but just accept it.
Do you have a reference for this?
I'm not doubting you but a couple months ago I visited the A&E in Whitechapel for an ankle injury. I asked one of the nurses and the doctor who saw me (they were both lovely but seemed quite stressed) about this and both separately told me there are still too many Covid patients in the hospital. That, and the fact that NHS personnel keep having to isolate.
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare
The UK has around 150k hospital beds, and 5k mechanical ventilation beds, so its never been about the absolute numbers of Covid patients. It's always been the additional workload due to Covid policies (and that includes staff isolation). Those make sense, if it is deemed that catching and/or spreading Covid is worse than any other healthcare outcome.
So you mean that because there are plenty of hospital beds and ventilators, the system is not overwhelmed?
I see the doctors, nurses and the rest of the staff as part of the system. If there's not enough of them to cope with the demand, then the system is overwhelmed.
The biggest difficulty has been the Covid policies put into place, both inside and outside hospitals. It's difficult, time-consuming, and stressful to follow those policies (both parents work for the NHS, btw), not to mention the number of staff who had to isolate. The social services that would receive many patients after their hospital stay are also overwhelmed/falling apart (probably for similar reasons), so many patients cannot be discharged.
I'll say it again - it all makes sense, if avoiding Covid is the absolute number 1 priority, and if "letting it rip" would have made things worse than they are now.
Not that they were followed particularly well. My dad was in hospital for unrelated reasons, caught COVID and died within 3 days.
I do think that NHS staff did their very best to follow protocols (one of my parents went into great detail about all of the steps they had to go through in between seeing each patient). However, the idea that disposable plastic smocks and perspex screens will do much against an infectious airbourne respiratory virus is just silly on its face.
Really, given the sheer amount of people who caught Covid in hospitals, they should have shut the hospitals and let almost everything else remain open.
Or is this one of those times when it's okay to blame behavior?
The paper goes into it, just vaccinate everybody.
sadly any compromise bill just results in the wrong bill
no public option, which was scrapped from Obamacare (to get it passed into law at all), means no super negotiator with insurers
no medicare ability to negotiate, means no super negotiator with insurers
these nuances don't have national consensus, amongst people that are open to national healthcare
It has nothing to do with politics.
Excess deaths was because the medical infrastructure was overwhelmed. So ICU services were not available as normal.
From report:
> Overall, our results suggest that political party affiliation only became a substantial risk factor in Ohio and Florida after vaccines were widely available. > ... > Lack of individual-level vaccination status limits our ability to draw broad conclusions, but the results suggest that the well-documented differences in vaccination attitudes and reported uptake between Republicans and Democrats [10, 7, 8, 13] have already had serious consequences for the severity and trajectory of the pandemic in the United States.
> Excess deaths was because the medical infrastructure was overwhelmed. So ICU services were not available as normal.
I'm a bit confused how you come to this conclusion when the section you quote from the report says the lack of vaccination uptake is to blame along party lines.
overwhelmed medical infrastructure would hit both political parties equally. Unless you're suggesting that democrats in Florida have access to democrat-only-hospitals...
But also yes, some of this poetic justice.
Overall, conservatives are more conventional and less predisposed to try new things. This may suggest that they are less likely to follow modern knowledge on healthy lifestyle, introduce nutritional changes, increase physical activity or get vaccinated.
Religion may play a part, too. If you believe that your health is out of your control, you may not me inclined to do any changes.
So, conservatives are more ... conservative?
Seems like a claim that was invented. Physically fit men are substantially more likely to be conservative. [1] [2]
Your claims that "modern knowledge" even show how to be healthy are dubious, given food pyramids presented by government were co-opted by sugar peddlers, who bribed top universities like Harvard for pro-sugar 'research'. [3]
[1] https://www.brunel.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/articles/Muscu...
[2] https://www.dmarge.com/political-workout
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/well/eat/how-the-sugar-in...
Both studies talk about stronger/more muscular, not "physically fit" men. One can be fit without being muscular. You're confounding being fit, being muscular, and being healthy. There's overlap, but someone drinking only protein shakes and taking steroids to be very muscular because they believe "alphas" something is not someone being healthy.
In fact, gym attendance has been directly linked to lifespan and therefore general health.
> Seems like a claim that was invented.
You do realize that you ignored "This may suggest"? Also, the text we're discussing points at differences in being vaccinated. Which you also omitted.
To give you a comparison, before Trump and the pandemic, German antivaxers used to be from the esoteric, ecological nutrition and alternative healing communities, a subculture highly skeptic to traditional medicine with many connections to other fringe cultures. These were mostly left-wing progressives. The right-wing political flavoring came during the pandemic and from the US. This lead to rather bizarre scenes like this radical right-wing vegan cook book author or 70s peace-movement elderly feminists marching together with young Neo-Nazis in antivax protests.
There is perhaps another divide than conservative liberal at work since obviously if one did not want to try new things they wouldn't want to take apart a system that had been working since before they were born.