Do you notice a pattern here?

Every day, the Washington Post publishes on their main page graphs of the seven-day average of new Covid cases per capita, starting in February; they do this for the top six states, although if you click on the article you can see the graph for every state and territory, highest to lowest. I was struck by today’s graphs, which show the top six states of North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, Wisconsin and Nebraska. In the last seven days, these states had the highest new cases per 100,000 residents, ranging from 109 in Nebraska to 171 in North Dakota.

By contrast, the national figure is 43 (which of course is a huge jump from just a couple weeks ago). And the six lowest states range from Hawaii at 8 to DC at 18. To be fair, all of these numbers are increasing now, but of course the absolute numbers of daily new cases are far below the top six states. That’s how exponential growth works.

Hmm, what difference is there between these two groups of six states? Could it possibly be that the top six are all firmly controlled by Republican governors and legislatures (Wisconsin has a Democratic governor, but the legislature – which hasn’t met in person since April, despite being one of nine full-time state legislatures in the country – convinced the state Supreme Court to rule that the governor has no power to enact directives for public health. He’s reduced to pleading with people, which obviously isn’t working too well)?  While the bottom five states and DC all have Democratic governors/mayor, with the exception of Vermont, which has an overwhelmingly Democratic legislature, and whose Republican governor cooperates very well with them.

Of course, the governors/legislatures of all of the top six states have openly questioned the need to do anything about the coronavirus, and none of the states have universal mask mandates, even today. Whereas the reverse is the case with the bottom six, especially when it comes to mask mandates.

When I started writing this blog in March, I thought I would just be discussing technical measures that were needed to deal with the pandemic. It never even occurred to me that politics might actually influence how the US responded. Even when Trump and Pence made it clear they didn’t intend to do anything about the pandemic, I thought it would only be a matter of weeks (if that) before they were forced (by their own party) to turn over the whole coronavirus response to a competent, politically neutral person – as South Korea’s president did early on, with spectacular results.

I guess I got that one wrong…

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com.

 

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