Political Structure of China Coronavirus Victims

Since the beginning of the current pandemic, many websites were created to collect virus-related data.  For example, the site 1Point3Acres offers a convenient interface to U.S. data starting at the county level.  The site contains summary information about the number of cases and the number of deaths per state.  However, such data were never analyzed from a political perspective.

In fact, the adage is that the current coronavirus, like all other viruses and pathogen microorganisms, does not care about the political views of its sufferers.  In other words, viruses cross artificial countries’ or states’ borders without any regard to the ideology of their victims.  While it is undoubtedly true, the response of authorities does depend on their underlying ideology.

The data on the 1Point3Acres are sorted by the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19.  The site places the state of New York at the top of the list, but as we all know, that could be misleading because the populations of each state are different.  If we normalize the data by the population, the resulting number of cases per million of the state population will allow us to compare all the states correctly.

Finally, to look into the data from the political point of view, we’ll add each governor’s party (R or D) to the data.  Also, we’ll list the party affiliation of the previous governor — i.e., (D, R) would mean that the current governor is a Democrat, but the previous governor was a Republican.

The resulting five worst states (as of March 24, 2020) are:

State	Cases per million	Governor’s Party
New York	1,313	D,D
New Jersey	413	D,R
Louisiana	299	D,D
Washington	291	D,D
Michigan	179	D,R

The resulting five best states (as of March 24, 2020) are:

State	Cases per million	Governor’s Party
West Virginia	11	R,D
Oklahoma	26	R,R
Kentucky	27	D,R
Idaho	28	R,R
Kansas	28	D,R

Five out of five governors of the states most affected by China’s coronavirus are Democrats.  The states least affected by coronavirus either have a Republican governor or had a Republican governor before.  For example, the Democrat governor in Kansas assumed office in January of last year and was not able to contribute much to the previous Republican administration preparedness level.  A similar situation occurs in Kentucky, where a Democrat governor replaced the Republican in December 2019 and did not have a chance to alter the preparedness of the state at all.

Overall, 83% of all COVID-19 victims to the present day are under the Democrat state government, and only 17% of victims are under the Republican government. 

No doubt, the spread of infection has not saturated yet, and the final numbers will change.  We will return to this analysis in about one month and report the dynamics of the epidemics from the ideological point of view.  (Do not forget that the governors in all states are elected by their current victims.)

 [Originally published at American Thinker]