Two Years of COVID in 45 Seconds

[Chomsky]

Yep. You can see it abroad, too. Like it's hard to blame Italy for how badly things went at first. It got nailed first in Europe, and had to figure things out on the fly. Of course things were going to go badly for them. But by the time significant numbers of cases were showing up in Northern Europe, a lot more was known about COVID, giving them the tools to protect themselves. Some used those tools wisely, like Norway and Finland, and did really well. Others used it as an opportunity for political posturing and doomed their people to high excess rates of death, like Sweden.

The good news of all this is we have reams of data from a plethora of techniques used to combat this.

The bad news is, in this country at least, politics trump's data.

 

[TU Curmudgeon]

Since different states used different standards when deciding when to attribute deaths to COVID, using their self-reported numbers can be misleading. But where we can do a clear comparison is in terms of how much mortality was elevated in each place, during the pandemic. If, for example, in the five years before COVID an average of 1% of the population died per year, and then during COVID it was an average of 1.25%, that's a 25% elevation of mortality.

Using that method, I put together a visualizer that allows you to watch two years of COVID play out over 45 seconds, with the cumulative percentage of excess mortality for each state.

You can see that early on states like NJ, NY, and CT got hit hardest. Over time, though, other states wound up moving ahead. Eventually, looking at a two-year period from the start of April 2020 to the end of March 2022, AZ, MS, and TX wound up having the worst cumulative performance:

https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/9658616/

<div class="flourish-embed flourish-bar-chart-race" data-src="visualisation/9658616"><script src="https://public.flourish.studio/resources/embed.js"></script></div>

It's most interesting when you go to the site and watch the full animated "race," so you can see different states rise and fall over time (as policy gradually and cumulatively trumped dumb luck), but here's a screen shot from the end, to give you a feel for it:

View attachment 67387936

Excellent, are you updating it regularly and, if so, can I poach it for my daily/weekly stats report?

 

[TU Curmudgeon]

Wonder how the red states are going to explain this one?

"!!!F!A!K!E!!! News"?

 

[Schrott]

That surely factored in. Other possible contributing causes:

(1) It's poor for a blue state, meaning fewer resources to throw at the problem (though that didn't hurt some other poor blue states, like Maine).
(2) It has a very high Native American population (people with mostly Native-American ancestry seem to have been more susceptible to the virus).
(3) It has low humidity -- generally speaking low humidity is bad for controlling a respiratory illness, since droplets travel farther, and people are more likely to have small cracks in their sinuses.

Native population was the main problem in NM. Towns like Gallup and Farmington are the main shoping centers for Navajo. Transporting the virus from AZ to NM. Second the population in the South, retirees, is very conservative. The rates in the South were just amazing.
Gallup got so bad that the governor ordered a complete lock down of that city. All roads closed, nobody could get in or out.
The South West got hit very hard, all the way till Feb 2020. Low vaccination rates, resistants to mask and so on.

 

[snakestretcher]

Yep. You can see it abroad, too. Like it's hard to blame Italy for how badly things went at first. It got nailed first in Europe, and had to figure things out on the fly. Of course things were going to go badly for them. But by the time significant numbers of cases were showing up in Northern Europe, a lot more was known about COVID, giving them the tools to protect themselves. Some used those tools wisely, like Norway and Finland, and did really well. Others used it as an opportunity for political posturing and doomed their people to high excess rates of death, like Sweden.

I find it ironic that Sweden was being touted by many on the right of the political spectrum as exemplars of their approach in attempting herd immunity. Sadly that strategy failed and Sweden subsequently performed far worse than their immediate Nordic neighbours.

 

[Mina]

Excellent, are you updating it regularly and, if so, can I poach it for my daily/weekly stats report?

I haven't been updating it regularly, but feel free to poach it.

 

[Mina]

I find it ironic that Sweden was being touted by many on the right of the political spectrum as exemplars of their approach in attempting herd immunity. Sadly that strategy failed and Sweden subsequently performed far worse than their immediate Nordic neighbours.

It's about as clear-cut a policy failure as you'll find, yet right-wingers STILL think Sweden was somehow vindicated. They live in an alternate reality.

 

[TU Curmudgeon]

I find it ironic that Sweden was being touted by many on the right of the political spectrum as exemplars of their approach in attempting herd immunity. Sadly that strategy failed and Sweden subsequently performed far worse than their immediate Nordic neighbours.

However, Sweden actually learned from their experience and is now doing reasonably well (better that Canada, the UK, and the US).

​

 

[TU Curmudgeon]

I haven't been updating it regularly, but feel free to poach it.

Much appreciated

 

[TU Curmudgeon]

It's about as clear-cut a policy failure as you'll find, yet right-wingers STILL think Sweden was somehow vindicated. They live in an alternate reality.

Your post reminded me of an interesting historical fact (which is totally off topic for this thread, but which I thought that you might find interesting).

In August of 1941 Congress was considering a bill (to extend the draft enlistment period of one year) that, if it failed to pass, would have reduced the strength of the US Army by around 70% by the end of November of 1941. The Republican legislators were adamantly opposed to the bill, but it passed by a single vote margin (primarily due to a bit of procedural legerdemain on the part of Sam Rayburn). Had the Democrat who wanted to change his vote from "Yea" to "Nay" succeeded in doing so, the bill would have been defeated and the US Army would have been in a state of total demoralized confusion when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.

Not surprisingly, many legislators who actually favored the passage of the bill voted against it (because they felt that voting for what they thought should be done would result in adverse - personal - electoral consequences) in the upcoming elections.

Well, OK, so maybe that isn't totally off topic because many of today's legislators appear more concerned with ensuring their own personal electoral success than they do in doing what is right for the country. Whether or not you feel that that is something that a "Republican" (whatever that means) is likely to do than something that a "Democrat" (whatever that means) is likely to do I leave to you.

 

[Phys251]

It's about as clear-cut a policy failure as you'll find, yet right-wingers STILL think Sweden was somehow vindicated. They live in an alternate reality.

For the more extreme righties, I wonder if they didn't advocate the Swedish approach in spite of the fact that more people died under it...or BECAUSE more people died.

 

[Mina]

Much appreciated

If you're ever interested in updating it, I can walk you through it. The only hard part is converting the CDC data (which comes out as one long column of data) to the format that visualizer website uses (which requires each state to have its own row, with the columns for the data for each date). There's probably some clever pivot-table or "VLOOKUP" way to do that, but I didn't want to take the time figuring that out, so I just did a quick macro that would copy and transpose-paste for me, which did it. It takes maybe 10 minutes, total, to do it, if you have Excel.

 

[Mina]

However, Sweden actually learned from their experience and is now doing reasonably well (better that Canada, the UK, and the US).

View attachment 67388570​

I think Sweden realized they screwed up badly with their policy of "look how clever and contrarian we are, by rejecting advice from public health experts." After the better part of year's worth of a humiliating performance relative to their neighbors, they resolved not to replicate that kind of stunt when it came to vaccines. Once those tools were available, they didn't try to outthink the experts with an anti-vax policy. Instead, they rolled out a pretty standard vaccination effort, and today they have a higher share of residents fully vaccinated than the US does -- a higher share than the UK and Norway, as well. They may have made a brutally stupid mistake, but at least they're educable. That's somewhere they differ from conservatives in this country. When data shows that a conservative idea failed, conservatives invariably conclude the data must be wrong. They never reconsider their policies.