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Study shows how Republican governors adopted politicized COVID-19 policies that invited disaster

Rogue Valley

Lead or get out of the way
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3/10/21
On Monday, the Republican governor of Wyoming announced that he was ending the state’s mask mandate and urging businesses to reopen fully. This followed similar announcements in Texas, Mississippi, Iowa, and Montana. Top those off with the states that never had a mandate to begin with—including top-10 citizen killers like South Dakota and Arizona—and as of Wednesday morning, there are 17 states where Americans are free to bare their face, and share their germs. In most of these states, not only have governors ended any state-wide mandate, they’ve actually ended the ability of any city or county to enforce a mandate, no matter how bad local conditions may be. However, as a new report from Johns Hopkins makes clear, inviting a surge is something that Republican governors have done almost from the outset of the pandemic. Ignoring lessons learned in states hit hard at the pandemic’s outset, cases “became much higher in states with Republican governors by mid-summer and through 2020” as Republican policies placed political showmanship above public health. Deaths in that initial surge peaked in late April at over 2,200 a day, but by the beginning of June that number had been cut in half as hospitalization rates fell, pop-up facilities were closed, and local officials got their hands around factors that control the spread of the disease.

What happened so that a year later, case counts are still higher than they were last May and the total number of U.S. dead is well over half a million? As the Johns Hopkins report notes, Republicans rode that refusal to enact even the slightest restrictions right into summer, and into a second peak that greatly exceeded the first. Through June and July, the difference in case counts between Democrat-led and Republican-led states grew rapidly. By Aug. 5, “the relative risk of dying of COVID-19 was 1.8 times higher in GOP-led states.” The researchers put it mildly by saying, “links they found between Republican governorship and greater COVID-19 impact, are consistent with the idea that the political polarization of the COVID-19 response has contributed to less effective COVID-19 policies and worse case-related statistics in some states.” Putting that more bluntly, Republican governors—and the tone set by Donald Trump—are directly responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, and millions of Americans suffering long-term effects of COVID-19. Unlike those states hit by the disease in the opening weeks, they were not short of tests, they were not ignorant of social distancing rules, they were not unaware of what could happen if they ignored the advice of experts. They just put their political careers ahead of human lives. By choice.


After reading the Johns Hopkins report, one cannot help but wonder how many tens of thousands of American dead rest on the shoulders of Republican governors, focused only on currying political favor with Donald Trump.

 
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