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State COVID death rates as of February 2024 [1]

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Date: 2024-02-22  

I am posting this to put some more solid data behind Biden’s complaints about our response to the COVID epidemic. www.washingtonpost.com/...The United States COVID death rate is very high. Looking at a regularly updated table of 192 countries ranked by COVID death rates shows that if Mississippi was a country it would be fifth from the top in that table. Only four of these 192 countries have total COVID death rate higher than Mississippi. Alabama, where I live, is next in this merged table after Mississippi. That is not the kind of COVID death rate we should find in any state in the country that spends the most on health care. And state differences in COVID death rates are substantial. I merged the state data with 192 countries and found that going down the list from Mississippi to the state with the lowest COVID death rate, Vermont ranked 118th. The United States as a whole ranked 20th on the list before I added the states. While 19 countries had a higher COVID death rate than the United States, 172 countries have had a lower COVID death rate than the United States.

Now COVID vaccination rates are not the only cause of reduced COVID death rates. No country is 100% vaccinated and a vaccinated person can become infected, although much less likely to, than an unvaccinated person. And when they are infected they get less sick, are much less likely to die, and they are less likely to infect others. But while the infection is going through its cycle, infection of others is possible.

The most unique COVID factor in the United States has been promoting the anti-vaccine movement are the religious fundamentalist and the Republican party. I have used several approaches analyzing the data available to measure the effect of politics on our number of COVID deaths and calculated hypothetical rates. I have found using data on the Biden and Trump vote in the last presidential election I was able measure the relationship between state voting in that election and the COVID death rate. The statistical technique I used was regression analysis, the details of which I won’t go into here. I was able to use those results to predict the COVID death rates and predict the number of COVID deaths if each party got all the votes.

If the entire United States had experienced the estimated pure voting for Biden population COVID death rate we would have experienced about 433,300 COVID deaths by start of this month. That would have been a COVID death rate of 130.8 per 100,000 which would have put us 80th on the ranked list of countries, just below Canada, at 135.23 deaths per 100,000 on the list ranking countries. The following graph shows the statistically predicted COVID death rate by Biden’s percent of the 2020 vote. The important thing the graph shows is how much and in which direction the COVID death rate changed as Biden’s percent of the 2020 vote increased.

Next we have the same graph showing the predicted death rate as Trump’s vote increased.

If we had experienced the predicted 100% Trump voting state death rate, 563.6 deaths per 100,000, we would have experienced about 1,866,836 COVID deaths by the start of this month. If you hit a calculator and divide 1,866,836 by 433,300 your calculator will show you about how many Trump voters died from COVID for each Biden voter and you will be more likely to remember it than if I did it for you. It needs to be remembered that in the above estimate of Biden voter COVID death rates they regularly come into contact with Trump voters who are more likely to transmit the virus to them. In other words, the COVID death rate without the anti-vaccine Republicans living in the same area would probably be lower than the estimates I made.

The last thing I will tackle here is just thoughts on why the Fundamentalst and Republicans actually fought COVID immunization. The immunization process simply stimulates your bodies natural ability to fight a disease once it encounters it. Now the immunization process is so effective in fighting diseases that the human species would probably be extinct without it. What giving those shots does is give our immunization system something that looks like the germ we might catch and it builds little things that float around in our blood stream that can kill that germ if it infects us. In other words, immunization is simply preparing our immune system to fight a germ we know might infect us and without immunization can suffer undesirable consequences including an increased chance of dying. Given that, logic tells me than anyone who opposes immunization must consider dying desirable. Why would they do that? All I can do is offer an extreme hypothesis. I think the declining membership in fundamentalist religions has made it very difficult to make the monthly payments on the loan they got to build those new and great big Churches. In general the higher death rate in a population the higher its church attendance rate. Are the church leaders and Republicans discouraging immunization because it increases church attendance and that increased church attendance increases Republican voting? The fundamentalist churches fought recommendations to not attend church to avoid COVID infections and a Republican administration removed that from the recommendations made by health care professionals. That has to be the major cause of our high COVID death rate.

If you can think of an alternative explanation for our extreme rejection of COVID immunization and all the extra deaths it has produced, let me know, I can’t.

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[1] Url: https://dailykos.com/stories/2024/2/22/2224961/-State-COVID-death-rates-as-of-February-2024?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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