VOTING FOR COVID

If we needed any proof that people's political beliefs shape their reality, this graph from the New York Times provides it:

Credit: NYT, 4/18/21

On the left, appropriately, are the states in which more people voted for Biden in 2020, and on the right, states with more Trump voters. Vaccine hesitancy rates range from less than 10% in true-blue Vermont and Massachusetts to over 30% in true-to-Trump Wyoming. The Times didn't provide a regression line or a correlation coefficient, but having dealt with lots of graphs of this kind, I can say that it's the kind of distribution any researcher would be thrilled to see. 

We're now seeing real-world data showing that fully vaccinated Americans have about one chance in 10,000 of contracting COVID-19, while their un-vaccinated fellow citizens have close to one chance in 10 of catching the virus, and among those who do, close to two percent will die. If the political beliefs reflected in this chart continue to determine vaccination rates, we're going to see two Americas. One that's highly vaccinated, where there's low risk of catching COVID, and where people can return to their normal personal, social and economic activities.  In the other, poorly vaccinated America, people may also be returning to their normal activities, but they'll be doing so with a continued high risk of illness and death from COVID.

Will that contrast wake people up or change many minds.? I doubt it.  As evidence, check this story of death-by-denial, although it's from Norway, not North Dakota.