[StevePerkins]

I think the common perception on HN, Reddit, etc is that COVID spread in the U.S. is primary a matter of conservative people flouting its seriousness. I understand the satisfying appeal of that picture.

However, I'm looking at my local health department's ZIP-code-by-ZIP-code infection map of the metro area. And it seems almost entirely correlated with poverty, not privilege. Infection spread seems mostly due to "essential" workers continuing to work. That's a problematic thing to point out, because I don't think we can or will solve for that. But it's plain as day.

[matthewdgreen]

I think the reason that HN, Reddit et al. have this impression is that state policies in conservative states are explicitly less restrictive than those in less conservative states. Florida just removed all stadium event attendance limits, for example. Within any given state there are all kinds of political beliefs and economic situations that may be more or less correlated with spread, but state governance is a very big variable.

[umanwizard]

Is there any evidence that level of restriction correlates with severity of outbreaks, though?

[matthewdgreen]

I mean, this seems to be the basic understanding of every single epidemiologist and public health expert, and also correlates with everything we know about the physical mechanism of how COVID spreads.

[ars]

To me it seems like a covid infection is inevitable. You can delay it, but if you look at the state-by-state figures: states that successfully delayed for a while eventually got hit, states that got hit did not get additional infections.

I get the idea of flatten the curve but states that already got hit hard don't really have any reason to impose additional restrictions they wouldn't do anything.

[ars]

And yet New York and California, both states with primarily liberal policies, have more cases than anyone else.

It's pretty obvious to people watching that the impression was created by liberal media that just wants to bash conservatives.

A cursory check of the numbers shows that it has no basis in reality.

[aidenn0]

California is roughly the median state in terms of total per capita cases at this point.

Top 5 states:

Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, North Dakota, Alabama

[username90]

California under reports deaths quite a lot though, they are much worse at reporting deaths than average for USA.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/05/us/coronaviru...

[aidenn0]

I was using COVID case data, not COVID deaths.

In any event TX, NJ, and FL all have similar reported COVID deaths, but CA has fewer excess deaths than TX or NJ. Some of that is probably due to e.g. reduced automotive mortalities under more stringent lockdown, but I don't think the data you posted indicats that CA is e.g. worse than the other 3 states at reporting COVID deaths (otherwise we would see a much higher excess death count in CA compared to those 3 states).

[mcguire]

Anecdotally, out here in the rural wilds of Alabama, most people seem to be wearing masks. I recently went into downtown Huntsville and no one was. Poverty and essential workers may be a significant component, but given the behavior of the young and affluent here, I don't think that is all of it.

[HarryHirsch]

Yes, you'd say that the Red areas are on aggregate older, poorer and less likely to work from home.

That said, at my regional college in the Deep South, case numbers have dropped noticeably since the beginning of term - instead of 30 cases every day we have now ten, and there have been remarkably few outbreaks at frathouses, all that despite no organized testing.

[sarchertech]

Conservative people are much more likely to live in rural areas. Liberals in more urban areas. Viruses spread much more effectively in higher population densities.

So you'd really need to look at per capita infection rates and control for density, not absolute numbers.

For some anecdata, in my moderate county we have a mask mandate. The surrounding less populated and much more conservative areas don't. Since the mask mandate was put in place more than half of the cases in my county's hospitals have been from the surrounding counties. Despite that fact that they have an order of magnitude fewer people, and despite that fact that we have far more people living in poverty in absolute terms than they do.