One More point re. the Red/Blue COVID divide...

Last week I posted the latest update to my ongoing Red/Blue America COVID-19 Death Rate series.

As always, here's my methodology:

• County-level 2020 Population data via U.S. Census Bureau's 2020 Census
• County-level 2020 Trump vote data via each state's Election Commission or Secretary of State websites
• County-level Case & Death data via Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science & Engineering for 47 states; NY Times COVID-10 in the United States github for NE & UT only; & the White House COVID-19 Team Community Profile Report for Florida only.

Remember: "Decile" means 1/10th or 10% of the total population (all 50 states + DC).

As I noted, the death rate since May 1, 2021 (the point when all U.S. adults were eligible to get vaccinated against COVID) in the reddest tenth of the country is still over 3.0x higher than in the bluest tenth:

However, it's also important to note that the 3:1 red/blue ratio is still dramatically high, it's actually been dropping gradually since it reached its peak of nearly 6:1 last October (note: I changed the starting date from 6/01/21 to 5/01/21 at some point, but that didn't seem to have much impact on the overall ratios since May 2021 saw fairly low COVID death rates as the the initial vaccines took hold and it was before the Delta wave arose.):

• Late October 2021: 5.97:1
• Early January 2022: 5.68:1
• Late March 2022: 3.24:1
• Late June 2022: 3.16:1
• Mid September 2022: 3.01:1

Given the ratio drop over the past 11 months, I decided to see what the situation has been over just the past few months. Instead of starting on May 1, 2021, I ran the numbers starting a full year later: May 1, 2022.

With just the past four & a half months included, the red/blue gap is far less dramatic...but it's still definitely there. The COVID death rate in the reddest tenth of the United States is still over 60% higher then in the bluest tenth, and even if you look at the reddest & bluest 20%, it's still over 50% higher since May 2022:

I also plugged the reddest vs. bluest decile numbers in starting on June 1st, July 1st & August 1st to see whether the downward trend is still continuing, but it seems to have mostly stabilized: Those ratios are 1.53:1, 1.68:1 and 1.77:1 respectively, which suggests that it's actually trending back upwards again, if only slightly.

Anyway, no huge takeaways here other than that I'd imagine that blue parts of the country completely abandoning masking, social distancing etc. since early 2022 has effectively cancelled out a lot of their advantage over red areas.