Political Asymmetry of Coronavirus Infections

The more we learn about coronavirus epidemics, the more it convinces us that pseudoscience is now accepted in all countries of the world as legitimate.  Many articles show an unpleasant picture of not just the pandemic of the novel coronavirus, but the pandemic of massive, Orwellian politically induced psychosis.

We’ve just begun analyzing the role of political preferences of various authorities in dealing with the epidemics.  The initial response of United States governors to the coronavirus was quite dissimilar, depending on their party affiliation.  The phenomenon was also independently discovered by Prof. James R. Rogers and is currently gaining traction.

To this day, the number of detected coronavirus cases in Democrat-led states exceeds the corresponding number in Republican-led states.  The asymmetry between states where the governor is a Democrat and states where the governor is a Republican is staggering.  For example, at the beginning of March 2020, there were 14 times more infected cases in the Democrat-led states in comparison to Republican-led states.  At that time, more than 90% of all COVID-19 cases in the United States were concentrated in the Democrat-led states. 

By the end of March, there were four times more infected people in the Democrat-led states than in Republican-led states.  Since then, the ratio slowly goes down, as expected, and currently is about 2.50.  The proper theoretical value of such asymmetry must reflect the population split between the Democrat-led states and Republican-led states — i.e., about a 54%–46% split, or 1.16 ratio. 

Currently, the spread of novel coronavirus infection in the United States moves in the right direction — in the direction of the theoretical 54%–46% split.  Such a move is slow, about one percentage point in five days.

The jury is still out on the exact driver of the described political dichotomy.  There are a lot of possible factors influencing such a process.  There could be some hidden variables, unknown at the moment, controlling such a phenomenon, which manifest themselves through the observed political affiliation of state governors. 

However, while looking into these factors, we should not forget the current flu epidemic.  All known mechanisms facilitating the spread of the flu viruses are valid for the coronavirus, too.  It means that the observed asymmetry cannot be explained by population density, tourism, travel patterns, or racial or cultural differences in different states, because all these factors work for the flu as well, and they work in precisely the same way.  However, the ongoing flu epidemic in the United States does not exhibit any deviation from the expected 54%–46% population split.

In other words, the current flu epidemic in the United States was politically “normal” from the very beginning.  In contrast, the coronavirus epidemic was politically abnormal from the inception and is moving to “normalcy” now, albeit slowly.

Since the beginning of April, the “move to normalcy” is remarkably linear (see the chart above), which allows us to produce some reliable forecasts.

If the underlying processes that govern such a linear “move back to normalcy” stay the same, the end of the dichotomy between sick people who tested positive for coronavirus in politically different states will be around August 1, 2020, plus or minus a week.  In that timeframe, the political asymmetry will cease to exist, but it does not mean that the infection will be gone.  By that time, any correlation between coronavirus cases and the political affiliation of governors will vanish. 

As for the beginning of the epidemic, the first sick people in the United States would have been detected (if coronavirus test kits had been available back then) around December 20, 2019, give or take a week.

[Originally published by American Thinker]