Death as a partisan issue

Charles Gaba is known as the indefatigable complier and analyst of statistical data about the country's health insurance status behind ACASighUp.

Yesterday, he looked at Red State/Blue State discrepancies in the diagnosed COVID-19 infections in states likely to be battlegrounds in the fall. He wondered: might Trump be correct that he benefits from treating the pandemic as an affliction of urban counties already hostile to him and his supporters and therefore undeserving of assistance? Can Trump win by backing demands from rural people to "open up" without regard for how many new disease cases he's risking?

Here's what the data said as of April 19:

Gaba concluded:

Democrats tend to live in densely-populated cities while Republicans tend to live in sparsely-populated rural areas, so it makes sense, but it's still disturbing. Will be morbidly interesting to see how/if these ratios change over the next few weeks... [with the rapid "re-opening" Trump seeks.]

My guess is that in the long run the urban counties will still have somewhat higher *cases* per capita, but the rural counties will have more *deaths* per capita due to a lack of hospital beds/etc, but who knows?

Via Twitter

No way to run a country!