Here's an interesting chart I put together from the results of YouGov/Economist polls going back to the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic:
Up through October of 2020 more Democrats than Republicans said they personally knew someone who had died from COVID-19, but the difference was fairly small. Starting in November, however, the difference jumped and has remained at a 7-10% level ever since.
And the difference is greater still for Independents. Even fewer of them than Republicans report that they personally know someone who has died of COVID-19.
This is a peculiar thing. Is it because the differences are real? If so, why? Or is it influenced by partisanship, with Democrats exaggerating their numbers and Republicans lowballing theirs? And in either case, why do so few Independents know anyone who has died of COVID-19?
It's because the greater your social conservatism the less likely you are to spend time among anyone except those exactly on your own brainwave, this is true even for large gatherings.
I would bet a study could even find that the more social conservative someone is the shallower their breathing will be among a group of people they don't know well.
Compounded by conservatives' increasing refusal to speak to pollsters, because the result will inevitably make them self conscious of their increasingly marginal status and upend their belief that psychopathic disregard of others is a good thing.
The more civil rights legislation and protections are extended to previously marginalized groups the more social conservatives see their helpless victims 'getting away with it' by getting away and so the more they feel they've lost something and are no better than marginalized victims themselves, and polling is too obviously a thing that will demonstrate just that, so they hang up on pollsters, or lie to them.
Also, they're less likely to speak to others. So why would they know of anyone who died, even if they knew them personally? Dead people don't tell you they died.
Basically half the country voted for Trump...even in California one in every three voters voted for him. Not exactly marginal.
More people voted for Trump in California than in any other state. And Trump lost in a landslide here. But that’s still a lot of Trumpians living here.
This is right up there with the Matt Bruenig link I saw on NYTimes Pitchbot to a 2017 Medium post titled "Women & people of color account for majority of Donald Trump's support". Literally accurate, but profoundly imprecise. The kind of gotcha wordplay that my Ayn Rand worshipper high school chums would engage in to prove someone wrong.
I don't know anyone who has died from COVID-19 for the very good reason that I live in a community with an extremely low incidence of the virus. I live in an upper middle class area (Brentwood, CA) and the people are, one the whole, affluent, well-educated, and quite capable of adapting their lifestyle to staying safe. If you look at the parts of Los Angeles where people are dying, they don't have much money, they typically live as families in small houses or apartments, they don't have great health insurance, and they live comparatively precarious lives.
I think most people know other people who live all over the country and live in all kinds of ways. The first person I know who got COVID was my half-brother who lives in North Carolina, is a staunch Trump supporting libertarian and works as an air conditioner installer. My father in law, mentioned below, was a retired physics professor and was far far from being a Trump worshiper. The world is complex.
Most of my family is either in Los Angeles or the Bay Area. The LA Country Health Department regularly puts out an analysis of who I’d dying or getting sick and where those people live. Most of the people who live in my neighborhood or in the areas where my family and friends live have been pretty good about taking precautions and most of the business are very, very strict about things like masks.
I very casually know workers at the supermarket and so forth, a very few of whom have been ill with COVID-19. I think a lot of it has to do with being out in the world more (which I am not) and being unlucky enough to have an unguarded moment with a super spreader.
Hey, isn't that where OJ and Nicole lived?
Yes, that’s true. OJ lived in a mansion in a ritzier part of Brentwood. He murdered Nicole and Ron Goldman in a nice but less expensive part of the neighborhood a couple blocks from where I live.
My cousin died of Covid in Florida. She was my Mom’s sister’s daughter. We were relatively close when very young but I hadn’t seen her in over 40 years. She still spoke regularly to my Mom. No one I know in California died from it and only one niece and her husband had it in its mild form
I think an important factor is the prevalence of the virus in a particular area. With lots of infected and contagious people, the odds of picking up a high enough viral load seem to multiply almost geometrically. And indoors activities in such communities, like eating or singing in church, or close packed activities with mostly unmasked people seem to be very dangerous. This seems to be true regardless of other socioeconomic factors.
For communities with advantages such as I mentioned earlier, the reduced prevalence combined with people who are keeping you safe by wearing masks and taking reasonable measures, makes contact with a contagious person more like a chance event—accident happening to an individual.
My guess is Rs are underreporting. I have no clue what could cause the I numbers to be so low. Personally, my father-in-law died of COVID in November. I figured at this point nearly everyone must know at least one person who has died from the disease but I guess that's not the case.
Some people reason that if the person had underlying health conditions, then they didn't really die of Covid.
This is what I'm thinking. A lot of Rs must be rationalizing along the lines of "You know Aunt Betty had lots of heart trouble. You can't really say it was the COVID that killed her . . ."
They are acting like someone with COPD dying from complications of COVID infection is the same as someone with prostate cancer dying after getting hit by a car crossing the street.
Could also be related to how many people you consider "family or close friend". Even if two people are reporting accurately, the person who has twice as many people in that category is going to report ~twice as many COVID deaths.
I knew 4 people who died of Covid. 2 were recovering from a stroke. 60ish.
And two were healthy functioning 60ish year olds.
I haven't had any contact with a lot of people I know since the start of the pandemic. So I really don't know how many people I know who have died of covid, or even had it and recovered, for that matter.
So far, none that I know of for deaths, two recovered whose names I remember off the top of my head, and I think there were a couple of others but I don't remember who.
I know two people who had it, both in their 70s and both pulled through. The only person I knew who died is someone I met only a few times years ago, but a very robust guy, probably in his 60s.
Either (a) covid-19 is a lot more inscrutable than we think, or (b) the polling needs to be controlled for irrationality.
I'm guessing independents tend to be younger and with fewer social connections to old people than party-affiliated persons are.
Yea, my first hypothesis would be that 'independent' has a negative correlation with age.
And after googling it turns out this is true. 44% of millennials claim I vs 27% of silent in 2017. And that that tend is consistent across the other two generation labels.
I remember once reading that the number when nearly everyone knows at least one person who died was about the number of people killed in Vietnam, about 58,000.
That was in the early 80’s. Population was about 230 million.
What does "personally know" mean in this case? Do I actually know that person in the real world, or are they just some long ago former classmate or coworker who friended me on Facebook? In the real world case, I don't know anyone who died. But within the world of past acquaintances on FB I have heard of at least a dozen.
I knew two people who died in the first wave to hit Albuquerque, and a number of authors I had met over the years (Ben Bova, to name but one). My elderly grandmother keeps saying "she doesn't know anybody who got it" (and therefore it can't actually be "real" -- and I keep pointing out to her that, at 99, pretty much *everybody* she knows has already died.
Interesting that the Republicans are surging now......
I don't know anybody that died or infected. If Northern Republicans(who call themselves democrats now) in the northeast hadn't made such a big deal in the spring, I don't think you would even felt much effect from Covid until fall/winter surge, the main event. California's parallel reaction showed the ugly political truth of liberal and why traditional new deal democrats need to seize the party.
Before making conclusions about differing mentality, it would be best to find out if there is any actual difference in infection rate between the parties, not just what acquaintances people have. If Democrats are mostly "urban" and Republican mostly "rural" there would be first-order differences in interaction rates. The states with the highest infections rates are mostly in the urban Northeast, excepting the Dakotas where infection was invited with the biker congregations and other policies.
1% of NoDaks population died to the virus. Staggering.
According to this it's more like .202 percent. And the first four slots in per capita deaths are 'blue' Eastern Seaboard states, including super smart Mass.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covid19-death-rates-us-by-state/
You kind of expect more people would get the disease in the more densely populated areas, don’t you? With the Dakotas, according to Worldometers, North Dakota is #1 in cases per million and South Dakota is #3. The population of South Dakota and San Francisco about the same. Yet densely populated San Francisco has a case and death rate far below spread out South Dakota. And San Francisco is a tourist destination and has a high Chinese American population.
San Francisco took action immediately to mitigate the damage and South Dakota did nothing. I don’t know if that’s the reason but otherwise I don’t know what is.
Young, you got owned on that one
The northeastern United States got heavily seeded very early when pretty much nobody in the country, including those (unknowingly) most in the front lines, was practicing social distancing. I doubt the covid death rate in those states post-August has been appreciably worse than other areas in the US.
The statistica.com data appears to be bogus. It claims 594,431 total Covid deaths in the United States, which is low, but still translates to 455 per 100,000 population. Yet it claims that every single state has a lower death rate than that. It's not possible for every single state to have a below-average death rate.
Democrats are clustered in urban areas where they are more likely to know more people overall (since there are more people constantly around them). I literally encounter a hundred or more people every day in my city, many of whom I don’t know very deeply but I do recognize their faces each time I see them and occasionally wonder where they went if they vanish. Republicans living in the middle of nowhere might personally know the name and face of every single person in their surrounding county… but that county might only have a couple hundred people in it. So if Democrats know more people overall, logically they should also be more likely to know someone who caught any type of disease. I personally know many people with HIV for example, yet my cousins in rural Pennsylvania claim they’ve never heard of anyone catching HIV ever (and in their tiny town, that actually might be true).
I suspect Independents here is code for either “young people surrounded by other young people and thus relatively unaffected by serious covid health problems” or “self absorbed people not paying much attention to anything including other people dying if it’s not in their immediate household.”
That was my guess.
I think that’s extremely counterintuitive. Urbanites in my experience definitely don’t personally know more people than countryside folk.
They SEE a lot more people on a daily basis, of course, but that’s a different animal entirely.
Depends on what you mean by “know.” For example, I recognize the faces of all the baristas at the handful of coffee shops I visit, as well as the faces of the dozen or so restaurants and bars I regularly visit. That’s >40 people right there. And I overheard at one of the restaurants that a waitress I remember working there that I haven’t seen for a while died of covid. True, I don’t know anything else about her but her face, first name and the fact that she would sometimes forget part of my order. But I’d say I personally knew her.
The same stuff happens in small rural places too of course. But there might only be one coffee shop and a few restaurants/bars, so my rural counterpart will only know the faces of, perhaps, 10 employees at those places. My rural counterpart might know more details about each of those 10 people of course… it’s easier to remember more details about each person when the total number of people involved is lower. But with only 10 people vs my >40 people… well, odds are my group is going to include a covid victim are higher than my rural doppelgänger’s group.
Also - and this is purely anecdotal and we all know just because you’re “friends” on social media doesn’t mean you actually are close in real life - a quick glance at my own Facebook friends appears to reveal that the people I know who live in the middle of nowhere have total friends in the low hundreds while people I know living in larger metropolises than my own have total friends in the upper hundreds or low thousands. When one of them dies, everyone on their Facebook will hear about it… and then if they’re surveyed afterwards… they might be more likely to say “yes I know someone who died of covid” even if the friendship connection was superficial. Because the urban dwellers have more “friends” overall, I suspect they’re more likely to get the news that a “friend” died of covid.
How many people do we know whose death we could expect to hear about?
I have 150 still living Facebook friends and I would reasonably expect to learn of it if any of them died. Additionally I have maybe a hundred or so acquaintances, relatives and coworkers who are not included in my Facebook friend set whose deaths I would expect to learn of.
That's not a particularly large number and the chances that a person would have died of Covid out of a set of c. 250 people is rather small.
6 members of my family died to the coronavirus. 4 distant, 2 extended (cousins).
Covid saved Social Security!
Yea, my first hypothesis would be that 'independent' has a negative correlation with age.
And after googling it turns out this is true. 44% of millennials claim I vs 27% of silent in 2017. And that that tend is consistent across the other two generation labels.
Democrats have more friends?
I know folks who had Covid but they all survived. My boss's elderly parents got COVID both ended up in the hospital with serious cases, now his mom is in hospice and his dad is still on oxygen at home. Neither took the risk seriously, they keep on going to the supermarket etc. The parents of some of my friends died from it but none in my immediate family got it, we all hunkered down.
OTOH A co-worker of mine lost 5 Aunts/Uncles, older African Americans living in North Carolina, it really is two Americas like John Edwards always said.
I think independents are also highly educated. Most of my cohort of PhDs are 'independent' but now vote mostly Democrat.
Just this week my mother mentioned that no one close to her had caught covid. I only have a couple people in my circle of acquaintences who caught it (including a sister-in-law), and know of no deaths. The closest death is the husband of someone I occasionally attend meetings with at work, but I had never even met him.
I'm not too surprised by that. This is a disaese that flows through social networks. If it hits your social network, you will suddenly know several people who have caught it. If it doesn't, you can come out of the pandemic without really knowing anyone who got sick.
To begin with: This is a yes or no question. You can't inflate or lowball any numbers when you participate in the poll.
A hypothesis that has not been mentioned: "Democrat" includes African Americans. And it is well documented that they have had higher rates of COVID-infection AND of COVID-mortality. So maybe this drives up the Democratic average.
It is just as possible that different groups interpret the words "know someone" differently though. It sounds a bit Ockham's-razor-ish to me.
My across-the-street neighbor from when I was a kid died last summer, when Massachusetts was reeling. She was 90, and, I believe, living in a nursing home at that point. I only know one other person who even was knowingly infected, my brother's mother-in-law (she was in the hospital for a week or so, this was in Texas, but recovered).
My theory: Democrats include populations harder hit by COVID, including those less likely to be able to telework, more likely to live in more crowded areas/residences, and less likely to have good health care options.
Republicans more likely than independents to engage in risky "it's a hoax and I can't be forced to mask or get vaccinated" behavior.
People on the right in America have increasingly demonstrated a propensity to either refrain from answering polls and surveys, or, as is their preference, give untruthful answers. This is likely especially true for those conservatives in America who are feeling personally vulnerable or sensitive on the issue of covid, since the disaster unfolded under the administration of their God-Emperor. And this would be even more likely for conservatives who have suffered personal losses due to this plague. So, what we are seeing in these results is an under-sampling of relevant responses and/or error due to false responses from people on the right.
The thing I've noticed among Republicans is that they dismiss Covid deaths because of co-morbidities. I think that could go some distance to explaining this.
I know probably over a hundred people, children and adults, that have had covid and none of them have died. Only one was seriously sick. (Spent several days in the ICU.)
Part of discrepancy may be that large population centers, where covid was more easily spread, are inhabited by a higher percentage of liberals.
Most people (as in a huge majority) who contract Covid do not die on it.I had it in early December and obviously I'm still here. Nor do I know anyone who died from it, though I know other people who also had it. In fact when you compare the numbers who have died with the entire population that graph at the top is rather surprising.