Covid-19 diary: Part 44

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
July 11, 2021

I’m going to nitpick a tweet that I dug up yesterday. I’d seen it a few days ago, and I initially intended to use it to make a point in Saturday’s blog post about the continuing Covid-19 disaster. I ended up not including it, but I’d already dug into the data by that time, and I didn’t want the work to go unused.

On July 6, a policy analyst tweeted two maps indicating that the states that have partially vaccinated at least 70 percent of residents have received at least one immunization shot are the same states that voted for Joe Biden by at least 5 percent in the 2020 election. “[T]his is honestly stunning,” the analyst wrote.

I spent some time fact-checking the tweet, which turned out to be somewhat tricky.

One issue is that vaccination maps are updated regularly, meaning that a map that’s available on July 10 could differ significantly from one published on July 6. Another issue is that the maps can illustrate different things. Residents receiving at least one immunization shot and fully vaccinated residents would be the two broadest categories, but you could also examine percent of adults, or percent of residents over the age of 12, who have either received at least one shot or are considered fully immunized. (No Covid-19 shot has yet been approved for those 11 years and younger.)

Anyway…

This CNN page on vaccinations, updated July 7, features a map showing that 20 states had fully immunized at least half of their population. Here’s the image:

Maps of election results are easier to find and don’t change significantly from day to day once voting results have been certified, as happened by December in most places. This 270toWin map shows the 2020 election results by margin of victory. Nineteen states voted for Biden by a margin of at least 5 percent. You can find similar data in tabular form on Wikipedia at this link — click on the percentage indicator beneath the “margin” header toward the right side of the table to sort by margin of victory.

As of July 7, these 18 states had fully vaccinated at least half their population and favored Biden with a popular-vote margin of at least 5 percent:

California
Colorado
Connecticut
Delaware
Hawaii
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Minnesota
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New Mexico
New York
Oregon
Rhode Island
Vermont
Virginia
Washington

Two states not on the preceding list had fully immunized at least half of their residents as of July 7. Those states are Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. They preferred Biden over incumbent Donald Trump by margins of roughly 0.6 percent and 1.2 percent, respectively.

As of July 7, only one state had not yet vaccinated at least half of its residents but did see voters prefer Biden in 2020 by a large margin. That state is Illinois, where 47 percent of the population has received two immunization shots. Biden won the Prairie State with 57.5 percent of the vote.

Yes, there is a fairly strong overlap among these two groups of states. However, it’s not an exact match.

My point isn’t to pick on the guy whose tweet I linked in the second paragraph. It’s more to highlight that the appealing associations that we make based on stuff we see on social media aren’t always correct. Sometimes they’re dead wrong. Sometimes, as in this case, they’re close to the truth but don’t get the details exactly right.

If you saw the cited tweet and thought, “Trump states aren’t getting vaccinated and Biden states are,” well, that’s a bit of an oversimplification.

Incidentally, Charles Gaba, the health-care analyst known for his Obamacare-centered website, ACAsignups.net, saw the same tweet I did. He replied with a link to a July 4 tweet of his showing that high percentages of votes for Trump correlate with high low vaccination rates. Gaba has also created a similar scatter plot breaking down votes and vaccination by county. The analyst has another post plotting votes and vaccinations by counties within four national regions. As a broad rule of thumb, the association holds: Democratic-leaning jurisdictions have higher vaccination rates than Republican-leaning ones, based on 2020 election results.

Are there any conservatives who have pondered these data and given serious thought as to how to change vaccination levels in Republican-leaning counties and states? For everyone’s sake, I certainly hope so. Too many have died already, and more will perish if we don’t take active steps to fight Covid-19.

Author’s note: This post originally appeared under the title “Covid diary: Part 44.” To conform with earlier entries in this series, I later changed the name to “Covid-19 diary: Part 44.” MEM