‘There’s Just No Give On Their Position’: COVID Killing 2.3 Times Faster In Trump Counties!

Yahoo.com, By Doug Livingston-AKRON BEACON JOURNAL, Posted December 22nd 2021

Jessica Bates thought her argument would finally make itself.

A registered Republican from a conservative family, Bates and her husband have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 since April to protect their young son.

“I am the only vaccinated person in my family,” she said. “That’s parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles — all of them. It’s just me. And it’s been a struggle since this first started 20 months ago.”

Bates learned early that facts are a waste of time when one side doesn’t believe the source. As misinformation has spread, she found it best to avoid discussing anything involving the pandemic — the masks, the vaccines, the death tolls and the infection rates.

“I realized pretty quickly that I was on a different side of the issue than my family,” Bates, 31, said. “And that was new territory for me. We usually don’t disagree on anything, at least not this strongly.”

COVID-19 in Ohio: She was vaccinated but got COVID. Millions face waning immunity, booster confusion

The polarization of the COVID-19 pandemic

The pandemic has pressure cooked American polarization, especially among already warring political tribes. Even families with more cohesive politics are not immune.

And the apolitical pathogen is preying on the side that’s disregarding the research.

As the delta variant surges for a sixth month, ballot box support for the former or current president is the best predictor of whether communities get the shot or watch more neighbors die.

Residents of Ohio counties that voted 80% or better for Donald Trump are dying of COVID 2.3 times more often than counties Joe Biden won, according to the Beacon Journal’s county-level analysis of 2020 election results and deaths since July 1, as reported by the Ohio Department of Health.

Partisan opinions on vaccines, the media and public health are now measurable proxies for who lives and dies.

Since July, when the bulk of Ohioans who are now vaccinated got their last shots, one in every 1,195 residents died of COVID in the seven counties that swung hard for Trump, compared to one in 2,760 residents in the seven urban counties Biden won.

Two counties — Vinton and Pike — have recorded more deaths in the past five months than in the previous 15, which included a devastating surge last winter. Also clustered in Appalachian counties near Portsmouth, the counties of Brown and Adams are each four COVID deaths away from surpassing the death toll of the first 15 months of the pandemic. Coshocton, just below Holmes County, is the closest to northeast Ohio with the most disproportionate number of deaths in the last five months.

Trump collected 73% to 80% of the votes in all these deep red counties last year.

And the death count is likely higher than reported as the Ohio Department of Health waits weeks for the CDC to verify death certificates, meaning some deaths in the last few weeks are not yet counted in the state’s data.

Votes predict vaccination rates

Political ties to vaccination and death rates mirror national reports and holds true across Ohio.

A vote for Biden or Trump has about a 63% chance of accurately predicting a county’s vaccination rate whereas race, graduating high school, population density and median household income are each less reliable than flipping a coin.

Even age, the single most common factor in deaths, has little influence on predicting community vaccination rates or deaths during the delta surge. Counties’ 60-and-older population (an age group that accounts for nearly 90% of all COVID deaths to date in Ohio) had less than a 6% chance of predicting death rates since July 1 and a less than 2% chance of predicting a county’s vaccination rate.

Partisan tilt is, however, a stronger predictor of vaccination than death, suggesting human behaviors other than vaccine acceptance are impacting mortality.

The Kaiser Family Foundation reports vaccination rates of 91% for Democrats and 59% for Republicans. With 4.3 million Ohioans eligible for a booster, a majority of Democrats say they’ll get it while about seven in 10 Republicans say they won’t.

The only other factor the Beacon Journal found that comes close is the percent of residents with at least four-year college degrees, which predicts vaccination rates with 62% accuracy.

While studies closely link college education and intelligence scores, advanced degrees also track with higher news consumption, less reliance on word-of-mouth evidence or social media, and the willingness to seek out alternative viewpoints.

‘They’re sacrificial people’

But a college degree isn’t the end-all for understanding the virus.

Take Bates’ experience with her family.

She recently caught the virus, developing little more than a sinus infection. Her isolation ended the day before she hosted Thanksgiving dinner. Her family expressed concerns for her health but barely broached the subject when Bates said she needed help cooking because she still couldn’t taste or smell.

Her family also knew that a close friend to them and Bates — an otherwise healthy woman about 40 years old and unvaccinated — was suffering badly from the virus. She was still in the intensive care unit last week, Bates said.

“I thought that it would be a pretty clear picture of the benefits of vaccination,” said Bates. “But it’s become more apparent as time goes by that whatever people’s views are, they hold so tightly to them no matter what they’re experiencing or what facts they’re presented with. They want to stick with whatever side they’ve been with since the beginning and they have a really difficult time accepting that any other truth could have any relevance in their lives.”

She says her family members are “smart people” and “caring people.”

“They’re sacrificial people who would do anything for anybody,” she said. “But for some reason, there’s just no give on their position with this, and they can’t even see it from the standpoint of protecting someone else, which in any other case they would do in a heartbeat.”

Conservatives susceptible to bad intel

About seven months into the pandemic last year, Pew’s public opinion polling found partisans increasingly disagreeing on whether the media was delivering reliable information.

By June, 47% of surveyed Republicans and only 31% of surveyed Democrats said they were finding it “harder to identify what is true and false about the COVID-19 outbreak.” Republicans were twice as likely as Democrats to believe the conspiracy theory that the viral outbreak was not only manmade but an orchestrated event.

Behind the divide are prolific falsehoods, some deployed on social media with intent to deceive. Kaiser asked a nationally representative sample of 1,519 adults in October if they’d heard of eight debunked myths and, if so, how many they believed to be true.

The falsehoods included claims that officials are exaggerating or hiding the number of COVID-19 deaths; pregnant women should not get the vaccine or that it causes infertility; that the anti-parasitic drug Ivermectin is safe and effective at treating COVID-19; or that the vaccine contains a microchip, can actually give you COVID or even change your DNA.

None of these are true, yet 78% of survey respondents said they’ve heard at least one while 32% said they believe at least half of them.

Overall, survey respondents strongly distrusted social media or far-right news sources like Newsmax and One America News. (Compared to Democrats, Republicans were more than twice as trusting of the two ultra-conservative sources.) Fox News got the next lowest confidence rating while local television stations, national network news and CNN scored highest on the overall trust factor.

People who trusted Fox News, Newsmax and One America News were two to four times more likely to believe at least half the eight falsehoods, the polling found.

‘We have to find a way’

In difficult conversations that have dragged her faith through the mud, Bates said her family believes she is “letting the government experiment on me and that it should be their choice.”

“They are in strong disagreement with any government mandate. I think that they just don’t believe the numbers. They think they are doctored or skewed to fit a certain narrative.”

Government sources used to be seen as more reliable than CNN, Fox News or Facebook, she said. “But now there’s so much distrust with the government that even if I shared an article from the government or NIH (the National Institutes of Health), it’s automatically discredited in their minds.

“I wish that we could come back to a point where we trust our family … and we don’t treat each other differently or less than because they feel differently than you do. I have felt very isolated in my beliefs over the last 18 months, even though I have been vigilant about never criticizing someone or putting them down.”

Bates thought examples like hers — having mild symptoms compared to two slightly older, unvaccinated friends who’ve been hospitalized in the last month — would have convinced skeptics about the benefits of COVID-19 vaccines.

“It’s still not going to be enough,” she said. “It’s not going to make a difference. We have to find a way to move forward without all this division.”