The cumulative effect of the COVID pandemic. I want to see COVID deaths vs Trump votes and Biden votes. Ignoring the first wave gives an incomplete picture of how many people died.
Yes, this approach is not forward-looking. It is a back-looking approach. The approaches are complementary. (It’s like looking at the speedometer vs the odometer.)
For me, it looks at the effects of the pandemic before the political calculations came into play. So it has no value to the question that I asked in the OP.
It’s not obvious a priori that politics didn’t play a role even from the beginning of the pandemic. That’s why it’s useful to look at both totals and time series.
Exactly. I’m still not seeing @Pleonast’s point. If you leave in the first wave, you add variables outside of political ideologies in behavior and governing. Looking at deaths muddies the waters even more because the case fatality rate in the first wave was huge, like 4% in NY, NJ, and Mass. And deaths are highly dependent on age, so you’d have to factor the average age of a state.
So what is the purpose of the “back-looking” approach with respect to blue vs. red states? I’m not surprised to see no correlation.
The purpose is to look at the data, instead of making assumptions. The totals are what you start from, that give the big picture. Then tease out whatever you can by slicing the data different ways.
I didn’t expect to get pushback from simply looking at the totals; it’s the basis from which everything needs to be compared.
In that case, I think it would be easier to see with two different graphs, one of Biden v. death one of Trump v. death, having both together clutters the visual and makes it hard to interpret. Or add trendlines to the combined graph and see if the trendlines have similar slopes.
Also - i’m not sure of the methodology of using voters per capita as opposed to percent of actual voters. A state where 27% of VpC voted red where Trump won the state and a state where 27% of VpC voted Red and Trump lost the state (because there’s higher overall voter turnout) are likely going to end up with different Covid response policies from the top down and different social practices around Covid from the bottom up.
Again, what are you trying to learn from the graph?
some folks don’t seem to be convinced by just eyeballing the data. So.
Using today’s data, I ran a Mann-Whitney u test to compare the electoral results (vote margins) from the current top 10 covid states (Arkansas, Missouri, Florida, Louisianna, Nevada, Utah, Kansas, Alabama Oklahoma, Alaska) to the bottom 10 covid states. (South Dakota, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Maryland, Michigan, Maine Connecticut, North Dakota, Iowa, Massachusetts, Wisconsin I assumed non-normal data distribution, therefore did not run a t-test.
The Dakotas are probably in the bottom 10 I think only because they did so poorly earlier in the pandemic, and much of their population was infected then. However, I left them in the list of the bottom 10 anyway.
Even with the inclusion of the two Dakotas in the bottom list, the test showed that the two groups of states were significantly different in electoral results. The top 10 covid states tended to be Trump supporters (Average 18.2 margin to Trump), and the Bottom 10 were Biden supporters (average 9.2 margin to Biden)
The U -value is 24. The critical value of U at p < .05 is 26. The result is significant at p < .05.
The Z -Score is -2.14775. The p -value is .03156. The result is significant at p < .05.
I was sent an article from a “friend” who sadly believes I have be brainwashed by CNN (or Communist News Network as she calls it).I am misguided on multiple topics apparently only some of which involve the vaccines and their danger. I will paste in a portion of the article first, a link to the article second, and a portion of my response to her at the bottom of this post. To say the least, I am not holding my breath waiting for her and her cronies to see the light and become vaccinated.
Snippet from the article:
They don’t want you to know that their own data shows that for the alpha variant, vaccination only makes sense if you are over 30 years old and for the delta variant, because it is nearly 7 times less deadly, vaccination makes no sense at all: for all ages, it will kill more people than it will save. Finally, early treatments are the superior alternative: they are proven in practice to have a higher risk reduction and better safety profile than any of the current vaccines. The NIH and WHO are deliberately suppressing this information in order to push the “mass vaccination is the only option” false narrative (breaking with 70 years of established science).
Link to the Article:
Some of my reply:
It starts out by saying it is the OPINION of the authors.
It then gives some statistics that are completely unsupportable. How could this one doctor know the delta variant is seven times less deadly? […snide remarks…]
This guy has taken some statistics he either does not understand- or purposely wants to disprove and used them in a way that is unconventional and inaccurate.
This is one of those many hack jobs that is supposed to sound smart to contradict the now Democratically led government in favor of what some wish was true. It does not stand up to examination. It does not even stand up to reason. For example, you cannot fake the fact that 99.5 percent (or higher) of all people who die from COVID are now unvaccinated!!
How can this guy’s claims be true if less than one half of one percent of all COVID deaths occur in vaccinated people. It is very easy to confirm if someone is vaccinated or not and there are hundreds of people who work in these places: doctors, nurses, techs, clerks, administrators, even housekeeping. If they were lying about that SOMEONE would have blown the whistle on them. (NOTE: She routinely claims conspiracy whenever inconvenient information is shared, that is why I am suggesting at least one Trump supporter must work in each hospital.)
Besides almost all deaths being among unvaccinated people, the fact that deaths are spiking where the vaccine rates are lowest – and declining where vaccination rates are highest should tell you all you need to know.
[Personal attack of her faith and ability to reason that I am not proud of.] This one guy is shouting into a windstorm hoping fools will be taken in by the “smart sounding sound bites”.
Please look at a map of vaccination rates as of right now (or in the last week) from any reliable source. Then look at a map of deaths from COVID (in the last week or so) and you will see this article MUST by logic be incorrect in the extreme.
[More things that perhaps were not the kindest words.]
She will not even read things like this this thread. Now that FOX News is far too liberal for her, the sources of information she will accept is quite small. I would love to have a map of the United States showing how each state leans with just a vaccination percentage rate number and a hospitalizations per hundred-thousand number (perhaps also a death per hundred-thousand number too). Just update it every Friday, or Monday, or whichever day. It will not convince her of anything- but next year she may get around to admitting her views were not fully accurate (if I know her). Everyone in her information bubble except for me has very similar beliefs about “The 'Rona”.
She will never change. Don’t even think she will.
If she get’s covid and is admitted to hospital, and all the medical staff tell her that the reason she’s there is that she is not vaccinated, and all the people on her ward are dying and crying out that they wish they had been vaccinated… she will never change her mind.
She’ll go to her death believing that the CDC and evil lefties have sent mind rays through the walls to make her sick; She’s mentally gone.
I am sure you are correct. Is it possible a majority of unvaccinated Republicans are as seriously unhinged as she is? Are they really so sure, so committed to the lies that they would rather die gasping for breath than admit they were duped?
Some others in the anti-vax crowd do not seem as extreme as she is, but maybe they are and just carry it better. I was pretty sure some of them were just avoiding being vaccinated because that would help Biden succeed where his predecessor failed. I am constantly anthropomorphizing them by giving them human emotions and human motivations but more and more it seems they are never going to follow me out of the herd no matter what happens to them. Perhaps all that can be rescued have been rescued already- the rest will never be real boys
Sorry for sidetracking the thread, I thought it would be good for us all to see how dug in some of these folks are where medical information is concerned.
I’ll take it!
Fortunately for humanity, but unfortunately for the sanity of our nation, the virus just isn’t that deadly. So while your misinformed anti-vaxx friend is much likelier to get sick from Covid, she’s still pretty unlikely to die from it. She’ll be able to deny she ever had it, or say it was no big deal anyway, and never ever ever change her mind or admit she was even slightly wrong.
I hope you are correct.
She does tend to associate with hundreds of people every weekend who scoff not only at the vaccines, but also at mask wearing and social distancing and because of the culture of this group I would be surprised if more than two hundred are vaccinated. I can say for sure that fewer than two hundred ever wore masks.
That leaves about a thousand to twelve hundred people. Rounding to a thousand even, what does that indicate? About a dozen cases, maybe one hospitalization and no deaths? Yep, it is just not personal enough to make her ever think about it honestly.
I think your numbers are far too low. With 1000 people taking no precautions whatsoever, just WAG you’d eventually see 200 cases and 10 deaths. But that’s still a small enough number (“oh, they probably would have died anyway”) to not change anyone’s minds.