/11

Excess death rates for Republicans and Democrats during the COVID-19 pandemic – comment by Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham @paulgp – Twitter
▻https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1576899935147991041.html

le tweet initial
▻https://twitter.com/paulgp/status/1576899935147991041

New NBER working paper with @jwswallace and @jasonlschwartz on Covid mortality: “Excess death rates for Republicans and Democrats during the COVID-19 pandemic” nber.org/papers/w30512
Ungated on arxiv here: arxiv.org/abs/2209.10751

🧵1/
Political affiliation has emerged as a potential risk factor for COVID-19, amid evidence that Republican-leaning counties have had higher COVID-19 death rates than Democrat-leaning counties and evidence of a link between political party affiliation and vaccination views.
▻https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.10751

original paper
▻https://www.nber.org/papers/w30512

2/ A popular commentary on the Covid crisis has been how much higher the Covid death toll has been in Republican vs. Democratic counties in the U.S.

U.S. Covid Deaths Get Even Redder
The partisan gap in Covid’s death toll has grown faster over the past month than at any previous point.
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/08/briefing/covid-death-toll-red-america.html

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FeI_V1YXgAA4P1V.jpg

3/ There are natural reasons to believe that there are strong differences by Republicans vs. Democrats: survey data suggests that there are big differences by party ID on Covid-19 vaccination:

KFF COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor Dashboard
Using a combination of surveys and focus groups, the KFF COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor will track the dynamic nature of public reactions as vaccine development unfolds, including vaccine confidence and ÷

▻https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/dashboard/kff-covid-19-vaccine-monitor-dashboard

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FeJBf1xXoAIScnA.jpg

4/ The challenge, of course, is whether it’s really about Republicans vs. Democrats living in these areas, or just the areas where individuals sort into are different.

5/ This statistical analysis runs into a serious challenge, driven by the fact that publicly available data on Covid deaths, and measures of political party, are typically only available at the county level.

6/ The focus on Covid deaths and counties has lead researchers to try to account for these locational differences (by controlling for features at the county level), but are still limited by the aggregated nature of the data:

▻https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/full/10.1377/hlthaff.2022.00085
The Association Between COVID-19 Mortality And The County-Level Partisan Divide In The United States | Health Affairs Journal
Partisan differences in attitudes toward the COVID-19 pandemic and toward the appropriateness of local policies requiring masks, social distancing, and vaccines are apparent in the United States.

7/ The other issue with this approach is that it focuses on reported Covid deaths as an aggregate measure. This measure may not fully capture the “counterfactual” deaths in the absence of the pandemic. Our world in data does an excellent discussion:

►https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid#excess-mortality-during-covid-19-background
Excess mortality during the Coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19)
Excess mortality is a term used in epidemiology and public health that refers to the number of deaths from all causes during a crisis above and beyond what we would have expected to see under ‘normal’…
►https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid#excess-mortality-during-covid-19-background

8/ Intuitively, calculating excess death rates requires a prediction of death rates in 2020 and 2021 based on previous years for the group of interest: namely Democrats and Republicans. Fortunately, we have mortality data with party affiliation, age, and location in this paper!

9/ We construct data using individual-level voter registration in 2017, linked to death records from 2018 to 2021, for Ohio and Florida. We then construct excess death rates that control for differences in mortality rates (pre-Covid) at the age-by-party-by-county-by-month level

10/
This lets us ask and answer three questions:

11/ Q1: Does excess death in 2020 and 2021 differ by political party, how much and when does this occur?

A1: Yes, the excess death rate for Republicans was 5.4 p.p., or 76%, higher than for Democrats. The gap was exclusively in the post-vaccine period (10.4 pp or 153%).

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FeJEXMUX0AAf1XB.jpg

12/ Q2: Is this difference explained by geographic or age differences in political party affiliation?

A tiny share of the difference is explained by differential impacts of age-by-county during Covid (recall that excess deaths already controls for pre-Covid differences):

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FeJEgiqXoAA6Wlm.png

13/ Q3: How much can we point to vaccines?
A3: This is harder, since we don’t have individual-level data on vaccines. However, two facts emerge:

A. The association between the Rep.-Dem. gap and county-level vaccination rates grows significantly after they become available:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FeJE3LzXkAA7qDI.png

14/
B. Moreover, pre-vaccine, the relationship across counties between realized vax rates and excess deaths was identical for both groups.

Post-vaccine, the Democrat rate fell and Republican rate climbed; and the gap between the two was near zero in high-vax counties.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FeJFZ0CWYAY2TnM.jpg

16/ If this is really a story about vaccines, the continued story of low take-up of vaccines + boosters among Republicans may perpetuate some of these differences:

KFF COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor: September 2022
Our latest Vaccine Monitor survey finds that half of the public has heard either “a lot” or “some” about the newly-available bivalent COVID-19 boosters, and a third (32%) say they’ve already gotten…
▻https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/poll-finding/kff-covid-19-vaccine-monitor-september-2022

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FeJFfuWXwAAfQPI.png https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FeJFmh6XkAAegr3.jpg

17/ We’re working on expanding this out now to contrast our results with the existing literature a bit and highlight some more points, but would welcome any comments or suggestions.

fin/ It is important to reiterate that our results hold fixed differences in mortality by age, location, and party pre-Covid, and can account for location-by-age differences post-Covid. Hence these are within-age-and-location differences in mortality outcomes by political party.

Opinion | We Got a Head Start on Omicron, So Let’s Not Blow It - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/28/opinion/covid-omicron-travel-ban-testing.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/11/28/opinion/28tufekci1/28tufekci1-facebookJumbo.jpg

Par Zeynep Tufekci

There’s very little we know for sure about Omicron, the Covid variant first detected in South Africa that has caused tremors of panic as winter approaches. That’s actually good news. Fast, honest work by South Africa has allowed the world to get on top of this variant even while clinical and epidemiological data is scarce.

So let’s get our act together now. Omicron, which early indicators suggest it could be more transmissible even than Delta and more likely to cause breakthrough infections, may arrive in the United States soon if it’s not here already.

A dynamic response requires tough containment measures to be modified quickly as evidence comes in, as well as rapid data collection to understand the scope of the threat.

The United States, the European Union and many nations have already announced a travel ban on several African countries. Such restrictions can buy time, even if the variant has started to spread, but only if they are implemented in a smart way along with other measures, not as pandemic theatrics.

Mr. Biden’s ban has similar problems — it won’t even start until Monday, as if the virus takes the weekend off.

That’s pandemic theatrics, not public health.

The reason we can even discuss such early, vigorous, responsible attacks on Omicron is because South African scientists and medical workers realized it was a danger within three weeks of its detection, and their government acted like a good global citizen by notifying the world. They should not be punished for their honest and impressive actions. The United States and other richer countries should provide them with resources to combat their own outbreak — it’s the least we can do.

Tragically, one reason South Africa put in place the advanced medical surveillance that found the Omicron variant was to track cases of AIDS, which continues to be a crisis there.

The antiviral cocktail that turned AIDS from a death sentence to a chronic condition was developed by the mid-1990s, but pharmaceutical companies, protected by rich nations, refused to let cheap generic versions be manufactured and sold in many poorer countries — they even sued to stop South Africa from importing any. Millions died before an agreement was finally reached years later after extensive global activism.

The callous mistreatment of South Africa by big pharmaceutical companies continued into this pandemic. Moderna, for example, has run some of its vaccine trials in South Africa but did not donate any to the country or even to Covax, the global vaccine alliance, until much later.

Wealthier nations must provide financial support, as well, for nonpharmaceutical interventions, such as improved ventilation and air filtering, higher-quality masks, paid sick leave and quarantine.

All this requires leadership and a global outlook. Unlike in the terrible days of early last year, we have an early warning, vaccines, effective drugs, greater understanding of the disease and many painful lessons. It’s time to demonstrate that we learned them.

#Zeynep_Tufekci #Omicron #Pandemie_circus #Mesures_protection #Regard_mondial

The New York Times sur Twitter ▻https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1464372422224879617

With 6,000 residents, a McDonald’s drive-through, bars and ball fields, the #Guantánamo Bay Navy base is more than one big prison. It has the trappings of small-town America and the amenities of a college campus.

Guantánamo Bay: Beyond the Prison - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/26/us/politics/guantanamo-bay.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/11/27/us/00dc-gitmo-slide-LVNR/00dc-gitmo-slide-LVNR-facebookJumbo.jpg

It has a Defense Department school system for the children of sailors and contractors, a seaport for Navy and Coast Guard supply missions, bars, ball fields, neighborhoods with swing sets, beaches with barbecue grills and pleasure boats to rent for excursions on the bay.

#Etats-Unis

Opinion | What Happens After the Worst of the Pandemic Is Behind Us? - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/18/opinion/covid-winter-risk.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/11/18/opinion/sunday/18tufekci/18tufekci-facebookJumbo.png

par Zeynep Tufekci

But despite having one of the earliest and most abundant supplies of vaccines, the United States has a vaccination rate that isn’t in the top 50 in the world — lower than many, many other countries that started much later.

Some of the reasons for our relatively low vaccination coverage trace back to the dysfunctions of our medical system. The United States is the only developed nation without universal health coverage, and our medical system continues to disproportionately fail people from minority backgrounds; such shortcomings don’t help develop the necessary trust.

But there is another dynamic. Many Republican politicians and pundits have chosen to pump hostility to vaccines and public health institutions as a platform for their supporters to rally around. Some of their claims are outright false or wildly misleading, but as with such demagogy historically, sometimes they capitalize on existing failures.

All this finds a ready home on online platforms designed to optimize for how much time and effort we spend on them. Even before the pandemic, doctors were begging tech platforms like Facebook and YouTube to take action about the rampant vaccine misinformation on their sites that not only existed but thrived. Leaked internal documents show that Facebook’s own researchers were worried about how rampant vaccine misinformation was on the platform during the pandemic. The public has even less insight into YouTube, but it only recently pledged to ban all vaccine misinformation on its platform — a step taken almost two years into the pandemic. This information environment fuels tribalization and demagogy the way warm water intensifies a hurricane. This, in turn, further degrades the capacity for mending our dysfunctional governance.

#Zeynep_Tufekci #Covid

Amazon on the High Seas - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/10/technology/amazon-cargo-ships.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/11/10/technology/10ontech-amazon-webstill/10ontech-amazon-webstill-facebookJumbo.png

Mammoth shipping containers packed with dehumidifiers in the Pacific Ocean provide a glimpse at how the pandemic and Amazon might be shifting shopping as we know it.

Earlier this year, a company called Aterian was in a jam with its hOmeLabs brand of dehumidifiers. You may have read about how difficult and expensive it has become to move goods around the world, and Aterian was feeling the pain.

The company was being quoted prices of $25,000 or more to haul a shipping container of products from factories in China to its shoppers in the U.S. The same shipment typically costs about $3,000, Aterian’s chief product officer, Michal Chaouat-Fix, told me. Then Amazon got in touch and offered to put the dehumidifiers on cargo ships that it chartered across the Pacific for a significantly lower fee.

“It was a huge relief,” Chaouat-Fix said. Amazon brought the goods to port, and Aterian arranged to truck them from there to its U.S. warehouses. Those dehumidifiers were then available to buy on Amazon, as well as from Walmart, eBay and the hOmeLabs website.

I keep close tabs on Amazon, but I didn’t know until Aterian told me that the company hires cargo ships for some of the merchants that sell in its digital mall. Amazon’s ocean freight service is not new, but it became more relevant as global shipping went haywire this year. Amazon has also added new options to what the company told me was a still relatively small service that’s available to few merchants.

Amazon’s adventures on the high seas are an intriguing wrinkle in the war to get products to our door. It’s also another example of Amazon’s growing network of warehouses, package hubs, trucks, airplanes and delivery vans that show that the company is becoming a force in the entire life cycle of products from factories to our homes.

#Amazon #Logistique #Concentration #Economie_numérique #Brick_and_Mortar

Missing Girl Is Rescued After Using Hand Signal From TikTok - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/08/us/tiktok-hand-signal-abduction.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/12/08/multimedia/08xp-rescue-3/08xp-rescue-3-facebookJumbo.png

Un signal de détresse qui peut se réaliser en direct ou en vidéo afin de prévenir d’une situation de danger. Devenu viral sur TikTok, il est reconnu par un automobiliste qui fait arrêter un kidnapper.

A girl reported missing from Asheville, N.C., and in distress in the passenger seat of a car traveling through Kentucky appeared to be waving through the window to passing cars on Thursday.

But one person in a nearby car recognized the signal from TikTok, and knew it was no ordinary wave.

The girl, 16, was using a new distress signal, tucking her thumb into her palm before closing her fingers over it, according to the Laurel County Sheriff’s Office. The signal, created by the Canadian Women’s Foundation for people to indicate that they are at risk of abuse and need help, has spread largely through TikTok in the past year.

#TikTok #Signal_detresse #Féminisme

Thomas Friedman et les ravages de la drogue (épisode 42) : Opinion | Would Russia or China Help Us if We Were Invaded by Space Aliens ? - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/01/opinion/climate-glasgow-russia-china.html

Le confinement marque une #frontière_culturelle en #Suisse

La notion de #responsabilité_individuelle parle plus aux #Suisses_alémaniques qu’aux #Romands, davantage adeptes d’un Etat fort. Les raisons en sont historiques et culturelles.

Exiger le moins pour obtenir le plus ; imposer le #semi-confinement pour aboutir au confinement : pour un œil étranger, la stratégie de la Suisse pour freiner la propagation du #coronavirus s’apparente au mieux à un exercice d’acrobatie, au pire à un orgueil démesuré. Pourtant, si l’on en croit les images de nos villes ce week-end, semi-désertes, il n’est pas dit qu’on perde ce pari. Par la grâce de la discipline helvétique ? Pas seulement. Plus profondément, c’est à la notion de responsabilité individuelle et de rôle de l’Etat qu’il faut probablement attribuer ce résultat.

Or, ces notions ne sont pas totalement identiques selon qu’on est citoyen latin ou alémanique. En #Suisse_romande, on a vu se multiplier les appels au #confinement_total, espéré par beaucoup jusqu’à vendredi dernier. Des citoyens l’ont même demandé sous forme de pétitions. On sentait aussi cette préférence chez certains conseillers d’Etat romands, même si exprimée à demi-mot pour ne pas court-circuiter la Confédération, désormais à la manœuvre.

En Suisse alémanique en revanche, les appels s’en tenaient au #respect_des_règles en vigueur, hormis des personnalités de l’UDC, réclamant des mesures plus strictes, avec de notoires exceptions, comme le conseiller national Roger Köppel. Même si Zurich a fermé ses rives du lac devant un afflux de promeneurs, le maître mot demeure « responsabilité individuelle ». C’est ce qu’il fallait comprendre du discours fort d’Alain Berset, taclant au passage le verticalisme aux accents certes gaulliens mais jugé inefficace de notre voisin français.

La synthèse entre la France et l’Allemagne

La Suisse, c’est une autre histoire, mélange du nord et du sud de l’Europe : « Au Nord, comme en Grande-Bretagne ou aux Pays-Bas, le premier réflexe est le laisser-faire, dans la certitude que les barrières naturelles se réinstalleront d’elles-mêmes, explique Olivier Meuwly, historien. Dans la culture germanique, on présuppose que la responsabilité individuelle entraînera la #responsabilité_collective. Une vision étrangère à la culture du Sud, où l’ordre est censé venir d’en haut. »

La Suisse, à cheval, décline ces deux cultures. Historiquement, elle fait la synthèse entre la France et l’Allemagne, ou la Grande-Bretagne et l’Italie. L’historien rappelle que dans les guerres de religion déjà, la Suisse a tenté la #synthèse en cherchant le #compromis.

Deux paradigmes pour un seul objectif, la #liberté : « Dans le brillant discours d’Alain Berset, toutes les influences se synthétisent et on perçoit une #mosaïque_organiquement_organisée », estime Olivier Meuwly. Ce curieux #assemblage s’articule aussi autour de l’esprit de #milice, du #fédéralisme et de la #démocratie_directe, « trois piliers de la « #suissitude », trois logiques qui marquent les #comportements ».

La responsabilité individuelle découle de la faiblesse de l’Etat

Cette valorisation de la responsabilité individuelle trouve ses fondements dans la #faiblesse_de_l’Etat, rappelle Irène Herrmann, historienne et professeure à l’Université de Genève : « Au XIXe siècle, Berne a lutté pour s’arroger un peu du pouvoir des cantons. Une partie lui est échue, une autre a été conférée aux citoyens, à travers la démocratie directe : ils devaient en user modérément et exercer sur eux-mêmes le pouvoir que l’Etat, très faible, était incapable d’imposer. Cet héritage institutionnel est très fort et, par conséquent, on n’imagine pas aujourd’hui que cela puisse marcher autrement. »

C’est un peu moins vrai dans les cantons qui ont rejoint la Confédération plus tardivement, comme le Valais, Genève et Neuchâtel. « Ceux-là acceptent plus volontiers la #délégation de #responsabilités à l’Etat, alors que les cantons alémaniques ont tendance à glorifier la culture politique basée sur la responsabilité individuelle, poursuit l’historienne. Cela aboutit à une survalorisation du pouvoir de décision de l’individu. » D’autres répondront qu’elle est salutaire. Ces différences de perception pourraient expliquer l’attente des Latins envers Berne à serrer la vis.

Un #Röstigraben de l’embrassade ?

Plus prosaïquement, ce souhait n’est sans doute pas étranger au fait que les cantons latins déplorent plus de mortalité que la Suisse alémanique. C’est vrai aussi pour l’Italie ou l’Espagne, contrairement à l’Allemagne et à l’Autriche. Ce constat amène le politologue alémanique Michael Hermann, qui dirige l’institut de recherche Sotomo, à émettre une hypothèse : « Il est frappant d’observer que le coronavirus a une #géographie_culturelle. Et si c’était le fait d’un #rapport_à_l’autre différent ? Les habitants des pays latins sont plus tactiles, ils observent moins de #distance_sociale que dans les pays germaniques. »

Un Röstigraben de l’embrassade ? Pourquoi pas. Sa supposition s’appuie aussi sur le fait que les décès actuels sont le résultat de contagions qui datent d’il y a trois semaines environ, soit avant les mesures mises en place par Berne. Michael Hermann insiste aussi sur d’autres différences : le #sport est plus largement pratiqué outre-Sarine, la #prévention sur la santé occupe plus d’espace qu’en Suisse romande : « Adeptes de la marche, de la nature et du grand air, les Alémaniques auraient beaucoup de mal à supporter le confinement. C’est possible que cela compte aussi dans l’#autodiscipline qu’ils observent. »

Il n’empêche : au-delà des divergences dont les racines plongent dans un passé qui, même ignoré, constitue le génome des Suisses, ceux-ci ont majoritairement suivi l’injonction des autorités et déserté leurs villes. Qu’il soit permis de s’en égayer avec ce mot d’Olivier Meuwly : « On dit des Romands qu’ils sont très français, mais ils se révèlent aussi alémaniques ! »

▻https://www.letemps.ch/suisse/confinement-marque-une-frontiere-culturelle-suisse

–-> article paru le 23.03.2020

Pour rappel, un extrait du discours de Berset :

https://seenthis.net/local/cache-vignettes/L600xH426/fqHRULZjpg-ee7a3-14399.jpg

ping @simplicissimus