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Covid-19 miscellany

Adam Lee then names five races that were likely thrown by COVID-19 deaths.

Race #1: Arizona attorney general
Est. C19 gap: 5,000
Victory margin: 280

Race #2: Pennsylvania House District 151
Est. C19 gap: 40
Victory margin: 63

Race #3: Michigan Senate District 12
Est. C19 gap: 240
Victory margin: 404

Races #4 and #5: Massachusetts House, 1st Middlesex & 2nd Essex Districts
Victory margins: (2nd Essex) 1, (1st Middlesex) 7

Will the virus evolve into some less lethal strain?
But there’s no law of nature that says this has to happen. COVID could keep circulating, and deaths could keep mounting. Unvaccinated people lean Republican by a 3-to-1 margin, and they die at up to fifteen times the rate of vaccinated people.

For that matter, vaccination in general is becoming a political football. There’s now a partisan divide in flu vaccination, which wasn’t the case before 2020. Measles, chickenpox and even polio are also making a comeback among unvaccinated communities.

It’s not a reach to speculate that, if Republicans become entrenched as the anti-vaccine party, diseases of all kinds will continue to exact a disproportionate toll on them. This means that the COVID-induced partisan gap, which was relatively small in 2022, will continue to grow and will make a bigger and more significant difference in future elections.
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If they want to sabotage themselves by being anti-vaxxers, let them. They talk about taking responsibility for one's actions and not calling oneself a victim, so they should do that here.
How anti-vaccine activists and the GOP are growing closer : NPR

There are some exceptions, like Republican lawmaker's pro-vaccine messages are part of an effort to 'get the politics out of the vaccination process' | Wisconsin Public Radio
Tauchen is one of a relatively small number of elected Republican leaders in Wisconsin who've been willing to be a part of campaigns to publicly encourage vaccinations. GOP leaders like U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson have spent months promoting false or misleading information about the vaccine. In August, state Senate Majority Leader Chris Kapenga, R-Delafield, encouraged hospital workers to defy their employers' vaccine mandates.

Public health leaders say the politicization of the vaccine campaign has had deadly results.

...
By October, the death rate from COVID-19 in rural areas was double what it was in urban regions of the Unites States, according to an analysis from the University of Iowa College of Public Health. Relatively low vaccination rates in rural areas were at least part of the explanation, according to the report.
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Your gas stove might make you sick, but your politics can kill you
Starting with the absurd culture war over gas stoves, and continuing with
Can politics kill you? Research says the answer increasingly is yes. - The Washington Post
In one study, researchers concluded that people living in more conservative parts of the United States disproportionately bore the burden of illness and death linked to covid-19. The other, which looked at health outcomes more broadly, found that the more conservative a state’s policies, the shorter the lives of working-age people.
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noting
Relationship of political ideology of US federal and state elected officials and key COVID pandemic outcomes following vaccine rollout to adults: April 2021–March 2022 - ScienceDirect
During the study period, the higher the exposure to conservatism across several political metrics, the higher the COVID-19 age-standardized mortality rates, even after taking into account the CD's social characteristics; similar patterns occurred for stress on hospital ICU capacity for Republican trifectas and US Senator political ideology scores. For example, in models mutually adjusting for CD political and social metrics and vaccination rates, Republican trifecta and conservative voter political lean independently remained significantly associated with an 11%–26% higher COVID-19 mortality rate.
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Back to the WaPo.
Covid death rates were 11 percent higher in states with Republican-controlled governments and 26 percent higher in areas where voters lean conservative. Similar results emerged about hospital ICU capacity when the concentration of political power in a state was conservative.

The findings cannot be explained away as features of the economic and social conditions of the people who live in various congressional districts, Krieger said. This is “somehow above and beyond the demographics of the district [that members] represent. It’s suggesting that there is something going on through political processes associated with the political voting patterns of elected officials,” she said.
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Adam Lee noted
U.S. state policy contexts and mortality of working-age adults | PLOS ONE
The rise in working-age mortality rates in the United States in recent decades largely reflects stalled declines in cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality alongside rising mortality from alcohol-induced causes, suicide, and drug poisoning; and it has been especially severe in some U.S. states. Building on recent work, this study examined whether U.S. state policy contexts may be a central explanation. We modeled the associations between working-age mortality rates and state policies during 1999 to 2019. We used annual data from the 1999–2019 National Vital Statistics System to calculate state-level age-adjusted mortality rates for deaths from all causes and from CVD, alcohol-induced causes, suicide, and drug poisoning among adults ages 25–64 years. We merged that data with annual state-level data on eight policy domains, such as labor and taxes, where each domain was scored on a 0–1 conservative-to-liberal continuum. Results show that the policy domains were associated with working-age mortality. More conservative marijuana policies and more liberal policies on the environment, gun safety, labor, economic taxes, and tobacco taxes in a state were associated with lower mortality in that state. Especially strong associations were observed between certain domains and specific causes of death: between the gun safety domain and suicide mortality among men, between the labor domain and alcohol-induced mortality, and between both the economic tax and tobacco tax domains and CVD mortality. Simulations indicate that changing all policy domains in all states to a fully liberal orientation might have saved 171,030 lives in 2019, while changing them to a fully conservative orientation might have cost 217,635 lives.
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Adam Lee again:
Now it’s gas stoves too. Conservative leaders are rallying the troops for their “right” to breathe polluted air, to wheeze and cough, to suffer asthma, heart attacks and cancer. Somehow, they see this as a victory.
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Like the "right" to be a COVID-19 plague rat, a "right" that some of them angrily defend even as they watch people die of the disease.
 
lpetrich said:
Will the virus evolve into some less lethal strain?
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Most diseases face evolutionary pressure to moderation because leaving your host alive to transmit the infection is to the benefit of the infectious organism.

Note that the long-standing and deadly diseases are mostly the ones where the symptom that causes the death of the host also aids the transmission of the infection.

However, there is also a class of disease where transmission generally predates symptoms. Such diseases have little evolutionary pressure to moderation because leaving the host alive doesn't provide much benefit. Covid is one such disease. We got lucky with Omicron in that the lowered mortality is the other side of the coin of the change that increased infectivity.
 
marc said:
FOX and other right-wing outfits try to scare people about 'dirty immigrants bringing diseases'. Apparently it is the conservative anti-vax citizens that we need to worry about spreading diseases.
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If you can sneak in across the desert you have to be fairly good health--the border crossers will be healthier than the average American.
 
I had written about this earlier: Did anti-vaxxer deaths from COVID swing elections?

That article notes
Covid death rates higher among Republicans than Democrats, research shows
The Yale researchers behind the new working paper say vaccine hesitancy among Republicans may be the biggest culprit.

"In counties where a large share of the population is getting vaccinated, we see a much smaller gap between Republicans and Democrats," said Jacob Wallace, an author of that study and an assistant professor of health policy at the Yale School of Public Health.

Indeed, his paper found that the partisan gap in the deaths widened from April to December 2021, after all adults became eligible for Covid vaccines.
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in turn noting
Excess Death Rates for Republicans and Democrats During the COVID-19 Pandemic -- Jacob Wallace, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, and Jason L. Schwartz -- NBER Working Paper No. 30512 -- September 2022
We estimate substantially higher excess death rates for registered Republicans when compared to registered Democrats, with almost all of the difference concentrated in the period after vaccines were widely available in our study states. Overall, the excess death rate for Republicans was 5.4 percentage points (pp), or 76%, higher than the excess death rate for Democrats. 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.
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and
The Association Between COVID-19 Mortality And The County-Level Partisan Divide In The United States | Health Affairs
Our analyses controlled for demographic characteristics and social determinants likely to influence COVID-19 transmission and outcomes using state fixed effects. We found a positive dose-response relationship between county-level Republican vote share and county-level COVID-19 mortality. Majority Republican counties experienced 72.9 additional deaths per 100,000 people relative to majority Democratic counties during the study period, and COVID-19 vaccine uptake explains approximately 10 percent of the difference. Our findings suggest that county-level voting behavior may act as a proxy for compliance with and support of public health measures that would protect residents from COVID-19.
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If this effect continues, it will likely throw more close races to the Democrats in 2024 and beyond.

I estimate the differential mortality as 0.1% of the population.

Looking back at the 2016 Presidential election, that was not enough to throw any of the state results, though Michigan was close at 0.22%. Donald Trump won by 77 electoral votes, and Michigan being thrown would reduce this to 45 EV's. The next ones are Pennsylvania at 0.72% and Wisconsin at 0.76%. Both together would have enabled Hillary Clinton to win by 15 EV's.

In 2020, the smallest Republican margin was in North Carolina, 1.35%.

Turning to the US Senate, in 2018, the smallest Republican margin was in Florida, 0.12%, with the next closest being in Texas at 2.57%. So with COVID-19, the Republicans would have had a 52-48 instead of a 53-47 majority.

In 2020, however, the smallest Republican margin was in North Carolina, 1.75%.

Turning to the House, in 2018, the smallest Republican margin was in GA-07, 0.15%, with the next smallest one in NC-09, 32%.

In 2020, the Republicans had some squeakers: IA-02: 0.002%, NY-22: 0.03%, CA-25: 0.10%, with the next highest one being CA-21: 0.90%.

That would have given the Democrats 3 seats, increasing their margin from 9 to 15.

Turning to governor races, in 2018, the closest Republican margin was FL: 0.4%, and in 2020, none less than 5%.

I'm leaving off here, because I'd have to do a *lot* of research to get good numbers for state legislatures.

So this differential-mortality effect is not likely to throw a lot of races in 2024.
 
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At CPAC, ‘illness’ and ‘death’ from COVID-19 are risks conservative attendees must assume: waiver - Raw Story - Celebrating 18 Years of Independent Journalism
Laughing in the face of COVID-19 has been sport during pandemic-era stagings of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference and its regional offshoots.

"Thousands of patriots and not a damn mask in sight,” Republican U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas beamed at CPAC Orlando in 2022. He cast vaccine and mask mandates as “a battle between power and liberty.”
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The freedom to practice Russian roulette with one's health, it seems.

For the upcoming CPAC event in March,
... conference organizers are quietly expressing a level of COVID-19 trepidation attendees almost certainly won’t see on-stage.

"COVID-19 has been declared a worldwide pandemic by the World Health Organization,” reads the "WAIVER OF LIABILITY FOR COVID-19 IN ATTENDING CPAC EVENTS” posted on CPAC’s website.

Several sobering paragraphs follow: “COVID-19 is reported to be extremely contagious. The state of medical knowledge is evolving, but the virus is believed to spread from person-to-person contact and/or by contact with contaminated surfaces and objects, and even possibly in the air. … COVID-19 can cause serious and potentially life-threatening illness and even death”

The waiver further presents CPAC as an event that comes with health risks.

“Attendance is of such value to me [and/or to my children,] that I accept the risk of being exposed to, contracting, and/or spreading COVID-19 in order to attend CPAC’s events in person,” CPAC’s waiver states. “I hereby forever release and waive my right to bring suit against CPAC and its officers, directors, employees, or other representatives in connection to any exposure, infection, and/or spread of COVID-19 related to my attending CPAC events."

Could someone who refused to sign the waiver still attend CPAC?

“No,” CPAC spokesperson Kaylee Spielman told Raw Story this week. “The COVID waiver needs to be checked for an individual to attend CPAC as it’s part of the registration process.”
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It is a remarkable gap, a gap between what the conference's speakers say about COVID-19, and what they do about it for themselves.

A gap that will likely get a lot of their followers sickened and killed, thus providing more candidates for the Herman Cain Award: Awarded… posthumously.

A gap that may throw more elections for the Democrats.

Such is the price of their culture-war demagoguery.
 
Even the New York Times concedes masks and mask mandates DO NOT WORK;

The most rigorous and comprehensive analysis of scientific studies conducted on the efficacy of masks for reducing the spread of respiratory illnesses — including Covid-19 — was published late last month. Its conclusions, said Tom Jefferson, the Oxford epidemiologist who is its lead author, were unambiguous. “There is just no evidence that they” — masks — “make any difference,” he told the journalist Maryanne Demasi. “Full stop. ”But, wait, hold on. What about N-95 masks, as opposed to lower-quality surgical or cloth masks? “Makes no difference — none of it,” said Jefferson. What about the studies that initially persuaded policymakers to impose mask mandates? “They were convinced by nonrandomized studies, flawed observational studies.” What about the utility of masks in conjunction with other preventive measures, such as hand hygiene, physical distancing or air filtration? “There’s no evidence that many of these things make any difference.”
The C.D.C.’s increasingly mindless adherence to its masking guidance is none of those things. It isn’t merely undermining the trust it requires to operate as an effective public institution. It is turning itself into an unwitting accomplice to the genuine enemies of reason and science — conspiracy theorists and quack-cure peddlers — by so badly representing the values and practices that science is supposed to exemplify. But “do something” is not science, and it shouldn’t have been public policy. And the people who had the courage to say as much deserved to be listened to, not treated with contempt. They may not ever get the apology they deserve, but vindication ought to be enough.
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NYT

Told ya.
 
Loren Pechtel said:
Masks don't work: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7106e1.htm

An 83% reduction in catching it isn't 100% so it isn't protection.

About as useless as a condom.
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So funny. Love your analogy of a condom to a mask. Very accurate. I actually witnessed testing of various masks in an engineering testing lab. It's been repeated over and over, but the Covid virus is transmitted through air particles that people emit naturally. We all have radius of air particles constantly being emitted from our body. The closer you get to someone, the higher concentration of air particles you get from them. Masks simply reduce the concentration of particles closer to the body. The better the mask, the higher the concentration to the body.
 
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TSwizzle said:
Even the New York Times concedes masks and mask mandates DO NOT WORK;

The most rigorous and comprehensive analysis of scientific studies conducted on the efficacy of masks for reducing the spread of respiratory illnesses — including Covid-19 — was published late last month. Its conclusions, said Tom Jefferson, the Oxford epidemiologist who is its lead author, were unambiguous. “There is just no evidence that they” — masks — “make any difference,” he told the journalist Maryanne Demasi. “Full stop. ”But, wait, hold on. What about N-95 masks, as opposed to lower-quality surgical or cloth masks? “Makes no difference — none of it,” said Jefferson. What about the studies that initially persuaded policymakers to impose mask mandates? “They were convinced by nonrandomized studies, flawed observational studies.” What about the utility of masks in conjunction with other preventive measures, such as hand hygiene, physical distancing or air filtration? “There’s no evidence that many of these things make any difference.”
The C.D.C.’s increasingly mindless adherence to its masking guidance is none of those things. It isn’t merely undermining the trust it requires to operate as an effective public institution. It is turning itself into an unwitting accomplice to the genuine enemies of reason and science — conspiracy theorists and quack-cure peddlers — by so badly representing the values and practices that science is supposed to exemplify. But “do something” is not science, and it shouldn’t have been public policy. And the people who had the courage to say as much deserved to be listened to, not treated with contempt. They may not ever get the apology they deserve, but vindication ought to be enough.
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NYT

Told ya.
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dankennedy.net

Bret Stephens wants you to misunderstand an easily misunderstood report on masking

None of us will forget those early, terrifying months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when there were no vaccines. No one knew what to do, so we all masked up. I was so careful that if I was hiking in th…
dankennedy.net dankennedy.net
Yet what the report actually found was complicated and easily misunderstood and/or mis-explained by the media. The paper wasn’t saying that masking doesn’t work — it was saying that mandates don’t work at the community level. In other words, if you are wearing a high-quality mask and making sure that it fits properly, you are doing a decent job of protecting yourself from others. It’s just that too many people weren’t masking, or weren’t wearing a proper mask, for it to make much difference at the population level. Tayag wrote:

The population-level detail is important: It indicates uncertainty about whether requiring everyone to wear a mask makes a difference in viral spread. This is different from the impact of individual masking, which has been better researched. Doctors, after all, routinely mask when they’re around sick patients and do not seem to be infected more often than anyone else. “We have fairly decent evidence that masks can protect the wearer,” Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Brown University, told me. “Where I think it sort of falls apart is relating that to the population level.”

Naturally, such nuances get obliterated by bad-faith commentators — like Bret Stephens of The New York Times, who writes today that the study shows masking doesn’t work, period, and that those who pushed for mandates should apologize. Stephens does include a to-be-sure paragraph acknowledging that individual mask-wearing may make sense, but he blows right past it, writing:

Those skeptics who were furiously mocked as cranks and occasionally censored as “misinformers” for opposing mandates were right. The mainstream experts and pundits who supported mandates were wrong. In a better world, it would behoove the latter group to acknowledge their error, along with its considerable physical, psychological, pedagogical and political costs.
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TSwizzle said:
Even the New York Times concedes masks and mask mandates DO NOT WORK;

The most rigorous and comprehensive analysis of scientific studies conducted on the efficacy of masks for reducing the spread of respiratory illnesses — including Covid-19 — was published late last month. Its conclusions, said Tom Jefferson, the Oxford epidemiologist who is its lead author, were unambiguous. “There is just no evidence that they” — masks — “make any difference,” he told the journalist Maryanne Demasi. “Full stop. ”But, wait, hold on. What about N-95 masks, as opposed to lower-quality surgical or cloth masks? “Makes no difference — none of it,” said Jefferson. What about the studies that initially persuaded policymakers to impose mask mandates? “They were convinced by nonrandomized studies, flawed observational studies.” What about the utility of masks in conjunction with other preventive measures, such as hand hygiene, physical distancing or air filtration? “There’s no evidence that many of these things make any difference.”
The C.D.C.’s increasingly mindless adherence to its masking guidance is none of those things. It isn’t merely undermining the trust it requires to operate as an effective public institution. It is turning itself into an unwitting accomplice to the genuine enemies of reason and science — conspiracy theorists and quack-cure peddlers — by so badly representing the values and practices that science is supposed to exemplify. But “do something” is not science, and it shouldn’t have been public policy. And the people who had the courage to say as much deserved to be listened to, not treated with contempt. They may not ever get the apology they deserve, but vindication ought to be enough.
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NYT

Told ya.
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You've said so much. But thanks for posting a scientific Op-Ed in a newspaper by a conservative columnist. The interview it references also seems to involve a guy that doesn't understand logistics... and is a tad bit biased?
Tom Jefferson said:
There's no evidence that they do work, that’s right. It’s possible they could work in some settings….we’d know if we’d done trials. All you needed was for Tedros [from WHO] to declare it’s a pandemic and they could have randomised half of the United Kingdom, or half of Italy, to masks and the other half to no masks. But they didn’t. Instead, they ran around like headless chickens.
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What were masks? A virtually harmless attempt to decrease transmission. Medicine free, no side effects. So any benefit (beyond tiny) is worth the price. At no point were masks supposed to save the day. Masks were an attempt to open things back up and not decimate the Health Care system.

And I'm really not sold on his take on this, or at least how it is being sold. This article does a better job at explaining the masking problem.
article said:
What many also failed to notice at the time was that studies that look at individuals – as opposed to populations – can lead to erroneous policy decisions. Studies which involve individuals frequently track people who have specifically chosen to wear a mask. But policies on mandatory masks are very different – they involve lots of people who don’t like wearing masks every day, and many people who won’t wear one at all. A study which only looks at keen mask-wearers will not reflect how people comply on a population level.

The Cochrane review findings report relatively low adherence to mask-wearing, which is similar to what happens in the real world. With better adherence and higher quality masks (and if you are careful when you step out the door), you might reduce your risk in specific settings by a small amount. However, when you scale up any potential small benefits to those who step out the door regularly, the effect doesn’t stack up as a population-based intervention.
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And of course, I think TSwizzle is definitely demonstrating the above and why mandates are problematic... because people are psychotic apes that generally suck at science and math, as well as risk management.
 
Elixir said:
Jimmy Higgins said:
people are psychotic apes that generally suck at science and math, as well as risk management.
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Ain’t it great to have folk here keeping that fact right in your face?
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Sometimes I wish I was one of them. It must be easier being angry... instead of having to sit through long boring discussions on risk management for large construction problems... how common is the risk with a particular level of consequence of the risk and what is the method/cost to mitigate the risk, etc... *snooze*
 
Why do you guys hate science?

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have concluded that lockdowns have done little to reduce COVID deaths but have had “devastating effects” on economies and numerous social ills. The study, titled “A Literature Review and Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Lockdowns on COVID-19 Mortality,” said lockdowns in Europe and the U.S. reduced COVID-19 deaths by 0.2 percent. Shelter-in-place orders were also ineffective, reducing COVID-19 mortality by 2.9%, the study said. “We find no evidence that lockdowns, school closures, border closures, and limiting gatherings have had a noticeable effect on COVID-19 mortality,” the researchers wrote in the report, issued Monday.
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News

Well, it was never about science really was it?

Told ya.
 
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