A new study looks at the top deaths by party association in two states during the pandemic.
Since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, public fitness officials have warned that some of us are at higher risk of suffering serious consequences from the virus, due to factors such as age or pre-existing medical conditions.
The new studies refer to something that puts other people at greater risk of dying from COVID-19: party membership.
The study found that excess deaths from the pandemic were 76% higher among Republicans than among Democrats in two states, Ohio and Florida.
In addition, the partisan hole in the higher death rates after the arrival of vaccines.
Studies conducted by Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham of Yale University School of Management and Jacob Wallace and Jason L. Schwartz of the Yale School of Public Health.
For Goldsmith-Pinkham, the sharp divergence in higher death rates that has emerged in the post-vaccine era “is quite striking . . . Republicans The mortality gap implies that this is a prospective mechanism. “
Whether component association affects COVID-19 outcomes and to what extent it has been widely debated among public fitness experts is not easy to answer. Some studies have found that the number of COVID-19 deaths is higher in red counties than in blue counties, however, county-level knowledge studies make it difficult to be sure that this component alone explains the differences. the death rate they voted for.
Goldsmith-Pinkham and her co-authors adopted another technique that would avoid those pitfalls. They collected nearly 600,000 death records in Ohio and Florida between 2018 and 2021 and compared the records with knowledge of the 2017 voter registry. This allowed them to find out the party association of each of the deceased.
Then, they used the 2019 knowledge as a baseline for expected death rates based on age, time of year, location, and party affiliation. a given season. Anything above or below the “normal” of 2019 was considered an “excessive death. “
The exaggerated death frame had two vital strengths: it allowed researchers to examine the effects of political party on the individual point than on the geographic point, and it provided a built-in way to explain differences in age and location.
When researchers looked at excess deaths before and after the pandemic, the effects were sobering. Tragically, though not surprisingly, both Republicans and Democrats experienced a surge in mortality in the first year of the pandemic. higher among Republicans than among Democrats, “or they die at very high rates in that period,” Goldsmith-Pinkham says.
The fates of Republicans and Democrats began to diverge dramatically after vaccines were introduced in April 2021. Between March 2020 and March 2021, excessive death rates for Republicans were 1. 6 percentage points higher than those for Democrats. After April 2021, the gap widened to 10. 6 percentage issues.
Does this mean that the other degrees of vaccination between Republicans and Democrats caused the mortality gap?Goldsmith-Pinkham says this study doesn’t prove this is the case. However, he believes it provides “pretty clever evidence” that vaccines are at least a vital component of the story.
And if that’s really the case, it suggests that policymakers deserve vaccine promotion interventions aimed particularly at Republicans, Goldsmith-Pinkham says: “It gives you a concept of where you deserve to look and who you deserve to target if you need to solve some of those problems.
Source: Susie Allen for Yale University
Studio DOI: 10. 3386/w30512
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