Death by political party: The relationship between COVID‐19 deaths and political party affiliation in the United States

Abstract

This study explored social factors that are associated with the US deaths caused by COVID‐19 after the declaration of economic reopening on May 1, 2020 by President Donald Trump. We seek to understand how county‐level support for Trump interacted with social distancing policies to impact COVID‐19 death rates. Overall, controlling for several potential confounders, counties with higher levels of Trump support do not necessarily experience greater mortality rates due to COVID‐19. The predicted weekly death counts per county tended to increase over time with the implementation of several key health policies. However, the difference in COVID‐19 outcomes between counties with low and high levels of Trump support grew after several weeks of the policy implementation as counties with higher levels of Trump support suffered relatively higher death rates. Counties with higher levels of Trump support exhibited lower percentages of mobile staying at home and higher percentages of people working part time or full time than otherwise comparable counties with lower levels of Trump support. The relative negative performance of Trump‐supporting counties is robust after controlling for these measures of policy compliance. Counties with high percentages of older (aged 65 and above) persons tended to have greater death rates, as did more populous counties in general. This study indicates that policymakers should consider the risks inherent in controlling public health crises due to divisions in political ideology and confirms that vulnerable communities are at particularly high risk in public health crises.

Trust in the scientific research community predicts intent to comply with COVID-19 prevention measures: An analysis of a large-scale international survey dataset

“…Given the importance of preventive measures in the prevention of the spread of COVID-19, whether the public is compliant with such measures would be critical in the current pandemic situation [5]. Even if diverse preventive measures that have been found to be effective are planned and implemented by agents, without people's compliance with the measures, successful control of the pandemic could not be achieved [6].…”

“…Even if diverse preventive measures that have been found to be effective are planned and implemented by agents, without people's compliance with the measures, successful control of the pandemic could not be achieved [6]. For instance, rejection of and noncompliance with the recommended and required preventive measures associated with political debates resulted in the recent drastic increase in COVID-19 cases and deaths caused by the Delta variant in multiple countries across the globe [5,7]. Hence, it would be important to understand which factors are involved in people's compliance as well as noncompliance with preventive measures.…”

Higher vaccination rates predict reduction in SARS-CoV-2 transmission across the United States

“…However, perhaps the most important variable to control was previous incidence during the same months in the preceding year. Since the same state-specific idiosyncrasies that contributed to case load last year, such as political attitudes [ 19 ], tourist hotspots, regional climate [ 20 ], demographics [ 21 ], and many others likely also contribute to case load this year, controlling for previous incidence allows for the model to account for the aggregated variation from these state-specific idiosyncrasies without the risk of overfitting the model by including each one individually.…”

Trust in the scientific research community predicts intent to comply with COVID-19 prevention measures: An analysis of a large-scale international survey dataset

“…Given the importance of preventive measures in prevention of spread of COVID-19, whether public is compliant with such measures would be critical in the current pandemic situation [5]. Even if diverse preventive measures that have been found to be effective are planned and implemented by agents, without people’s compliance with the measures, successful control of the pandemic could not be achieved [6].…”

“…Even if diverse preventive measures that have been found to be effective are planned and implemented by agents, without people’s compliance with the measures, successful control of the pandemic could not be achieved [6]. For instance, rejection of and incompliance with the r recommended and required preventive measures associated with political debates resulted in the recent drastic increase in COVID-19 cases and deaths caused by the Delta variant in multiple countries across the globe [5,7]. Hence, it would be important to understand which factors are involved in people’s compliance as well as incompliance with preventive measures.…”