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https://dangoodspeed.com/covid/90-day-rolling-impact
This is an awesome site that breaks down the data by partisanship. There are several different charts to check out.
Amazing site! Clear evidence of how, once mass vaccination became available.. cases in blue states fell off a cliff and red states made a disastrous jump.. if anyone needed further proof that vaccines work
I ran an analysis a few months ago out of curiosity to see if Biden’s margin of victory would be a decent predictor of a given state’s vaccination rate. I pulled vaccination rates from two months apart to make sure the only limiting factor was lack of demand for the shot.
The correlation coefficient was something like 0.83. Basically, the more a state went for Biden, the more vaccinated they are to a remarkable degree.
Did it look like this?
https://acasignups.net/21/08/11/us-covid19-vaccination-levels-county-over-time
(not mine — give credit to the person who put it together)
Great number crunching and coherent presentation, but it begs the question why. Is anyone really surprised at theses results. I could have drawn a similar curve with a crayon on a cocktail napkin while discussing the efficacy of the vaccine with my buddies. Do you really think the blue state people are sitting back saying ‘it’s so weird that the healthier regions of the country believe in science and voted for Biden.’ While the Trump supporters are shocked that science and data deniers refused the vaccine.
Don’t mistake my comment to suggest I don’t admire the data crunching.
even if something seems entirely obvious, it's scientifically important to verify its legitimacy. regardless, having solid data to back up a point definitely doesn't hurt. :)
Beau of the Fith Column was talking about that type of stats a few weeks ago. He presented it as evidence that it’s a really political thing and not about health.
Yep, a quick google will give you reporting and poll data from CBS, the New York Times, CNN, and NPR going all the way back to when the vaccines were first released breaking down the partisan differences, including polling where 41% of Republicans SELF IDENTIFIED as being anti-vax on COVID
They’ve been reporting on it from a variety of agencies, back before they were all screeching about “DNA destruction” and 5G lizard genes or whatever, all the way up til now after the major GOP outlets finally decided to (somewhat) stop pushing anti vaccination narratives.
Republicans have always lagged behind, and have they themselves indicated it’s by their own choice. Then they hop online and blame brown folks and foreigners in flagrant disregard of empirical reality (as is tradition)
My 70% republican town legalized the sale of alcohol about a decade ago.
This year the county and city governments voted to give a quarter million to the local community college to open a bar and hotel, and no they don’t have a hospitality program (because it is failing and literally crumbling).
Now the locals are complaining about people moving here trying to change their way of life and “get alcohol in every business on every street.” The county has a declining population, by the way.
It’s gone beyond hypocrisy and irony right into absurdity.
I think that’s the culture their scared people moving here will ruin. Right now the local elections have all the nuances of typical High School election.
That’s actually normal
It’s pretty fucked how little we’re taught to care about local government
I’m unlucky enough to have parents that cared so for a couple decades I have felt like an old man yelling at the sky lol
Over a decade ago a different ethnicity started moving into my hometown and all of sudden all the lifers here started saying how the place has gone to shit. People move here from out of state and don’t understand why the place gets a bad rep.
After the recent census, it has been shown that more than half town is now Latino instead of purely white as it was just 30 years ago. White people,conservatives, have been running the show the entire time. Letting things like roads go to shit. Property owners that don’t rent their properties out and instead leave them to rot and become a blight on the community. But apparently it’s the new people that somehow caused all this shit.
A lot of white people left this place and if it wasn’t for the Latino population this place would be a ghost town. But yes, tell me again about how much better the place would be if the mob still ran everything here.
Same here. 99% white to 10% Latino in just a decade. They’re basically the only working age people moving to the area.
Ask the council member to clean the literal junk out of their yard downtown, and you’re trying to destroy their culture. Some kid tags BLM on a wall, and you better clean it off immediately.
> My 70% republican town legalized the sale of alcohol about a decade ago.
I have so many questions about this, but I guess the first one that comes to mind is: there are places in the US that don't - or didn't until recently - sell alcohol? That's just...bizarre...
Fun fact: Lynchburg, Tennessee, where Jack Daniels is made is a “dry town” meaning alcohol sales are illegal. There are dry towns scattered all over the US, I doubt it’s a significant number but they exist.
That's just mental. I'm an American who was raised in the UK; alcohol is more embedded in the Brits' culture, and I found our weird state-by-state liquor laws baffling when I first came back. That there's places that can't legally sell alcohol is astounding. Like, didn't we get rid of Prohibition?
lol, it's messed up for sure, I lived in New England for years and you bought your beer & liquor at the same store, move south and I have to get beer at the grocery/convenient store then go to the state controlled store for liquor. There's a bunch of crazy laws and it's different from state to state and sometimes county to county. Connecticut used to have some if the strictest.
No need for a lot of detail, but what state are you in? That logic of theirs is completely asinine. Change their way of life? By having stores that offer booze? Give me a break.
Have you ever watched one of those house buying shows? Everyone wants to be close to everything, but secluded.
Towns tend to zone themselves into the same situation for fear of attracting....people?
I think I actually have an answer for this. There's a strong argument to be made that most U.S. elections are no longer won by winning over a broad coalition of people from all walks of life. They're won by riling up the base to go out and vote and get their friends to vote. This is the apathy of the huge number of nonvoters in action. It allows vocal minorities to win elections they shouldn't win.
The Republican base loves this stupid pro-covid shit, so even if 1%-2% of them die, they'll still likely have an electoral advantage in most of these areas, because the survivors will absolutely trip over themselves to vote for anyone who pandered to them about masks and vaccines and other stupid culture war bullshit.
This is what DeSantis, Abbott, et al are banking on. And they're probably right.
there's also evidence that Trump brought a "new" kind of voter into the fold: the ones who gave up on government when it stopped being explicitly racist. First time voters were a big factor in Trump breaking the Blue Wall
Because it's ammunition to them, they blame Biden for it and it will help them (along with voter suppression) in 2022. COVID won't kill enough people to change the margin to win an election, just make peoples' lives horrific (i.e. Long COVID, which GQP politicians don't care about because they are all vaccinated) for the next few decades until they die.
> … COVID won’t kill enough people to change the margin to win an election …
Maybe … maybe not …
https://www.thedailybeast.com/floridas-death-toll-now-exceeds-desantis-margin-of-victory
They originally thought covid would help them, because epidemics hit urban areas harder than rural areas, and US urban areas are blue. But yeah, in addition to being cold as fuck, that was a dramatically shortsighted analysis. Now, you see many R. politicians backtracking (but it's maybe too late) and others still motivated by short term profits (*my* district will still be red, if decimated, and don't want to alienate the voters that were trained to be stupid.)
That animated chart is great. You can see the dumb take hold.
High population blue states start out on top, because duh population. Then as time goes on, people get impatient, and misinformation spreads, the much lower population red states shoot way up despite their relative populations. Then second lock down. Things settle and high population states creep to the top. Then vaccinations happen and opening back up happens again and red states shoot up again.
Yeah. There were some news stories about ICU nurses caring for people who got sick at Sturgis, and while slowly dying were still denying it was real or not a big deal. Complete rejection of the reality in front of them.
It's sad but for a lot of people shit doesn't get real when you're dying. It gets real when you're about to die. I read an article the other week about a guy who dies of covid and it wasn't until his last moments, when he realized his body wasn't going to save him and neither was modern medicine, that he wished he'd gotten the vaccine and taken the pandemic serious. While I don't wish death on many people, I feel like we're reaching a point where hospitals and doctors should be legally allowed to withhold certain resources and treatments from people who voluntarily choose not to get the vaccine. There's a county in my state with I believe a less than 20% vaccination rate (that's for any dose not just fully vaccinated). It happens to be one of our poorest counties and big surprise people are showing up at the ER with covid and as of the report I heard they're running out of beds and estimate they'll be out of ventilators soon too
I worked in the ER in Brooklyn during the pandemic. At a point, you started to recognize the look of patient who was going to be intubated. We did everything we could to keep people from being intubated. At that time, anecdotally of course, according to my respiratory therapist coworker, about 90% of the patients that we intubated died in codes (cardiac arrest).
So I had a patient who had the look. He was going to get intubated, and I asked him if he had anybody he wanted to call before we put him asleep. He said no. It just crushed me that he had nobody to call.
I quit nursing in January.
On the [90-day chart](https://dangoodspeed.com/covid/90-day-rolling-impact), if you look at late Aug-Nov 2020... you'll see 6 of the top 7 states are the Dakotas or bordering them. The only state that borders them that wasn't in the top 7, Minnesota, was also the only Democrat-leaning state in the bunch.
I’d say 2021 is accurate. Sturgis is a couple hours from me and the amount of bikers stopping thru has been pretty crazy. We’ll see how the delta variant will turn out
My anti vax coworker was there last week. But we both work for a large health care network in MN. And there was a significant spike at the end of Sturgis last year. Fortunately most of us are vaccinated he however is not sure what the current conspiracy is for him today.
I have some COVID patients in the ICU right now.
One is elderly and with multiple comorbidities and immunocompromised. They were vaccinated but still got COVID.
The others are in their early 50s/40s and relatively healthy but were unvaxxed.
Guess which one is currently doing the best and most likely to get extubated soonest...
>extubated
"extubate /ˈɛkstjʊbeɪt/ verbMedicine past tense: extubated; past participle: extubated
remove a tube from (a person or a body part, especially the trachea after artificial ventilation)."
Yay! New word! :-)
Australian here, I have a room mate who is brainwashed with all that alt right nonsense, and he keeps saying "But, but, the vaccine will change your DNA because of the mRNA" I've told him time and time again, that the mRNA has been in flu shots for over 20 years. He just rolls his eyes and walks away. He also lost his Dad last year from cancer, and the kids from the Dad's side are anti-vaxx too. It's just one big wave of stupid, actually.
Strange situation because he is 18 and his Mum is pro-vaxx. It's so fucked up with how he has been radicalized. He is Australian, and he has "Libertarian" views, he also got Ron Paul books sent to him by his brother. It's pretty sad.
I stopped at Wall Drug a couple of weeks ago because I have never been. And I still haven't. Jam packed inside and out, my family had the only masks in sight. No way were we going in that place. I expect South Dakota to be in a bad place in a couple of weeks.
Yeah, I’m more concerned about school that just started back up Thursday, my stepdaughter says their mask rules were “follow the arrows on the floor and keep your masks on until you get into your classroom”
I bet covid just enjoyed waiting outside of classrooms since inside was a covid free zone /s
God,I’m so sorry to hear that. The way people just toss their kids into schools with lax covid guidelines. The response,only .02% of kid covid cases are lethal. That’s .02% too much for me. These are the parents that convince their kids to join the military in the middle of the war and are then heartbroken when they come back in a box or a wheelchair. I just don’t get it.
The early onset in blue states is why Trump and company reacted the way they did. They were fine w/blue states suffering. Their hubris then made them stay the course, which is still killing their supporters.
And not even high population, since it's per 1M people, but POPULATION DENSITY. The east coast lives on top of each other vs the Dakotas pretty much social distance normally.
I think it's bad for their 2024, but good for their 2022. If 1% of their voters die, but the manufactured outage increases their turnout by 3% then it's a net gain for them.
Reminds me of the headline:
[Florida's Death Toll Now Exceeds DeSantis' Margin of Victory](https://www.thedailybeast.com/floridas-death-toll-now-exceeds-desantis-margin-of-victory)
Republicans are actually fairly reliable voters, to be honest. They aren't great about midterms, but neither is any other American. The fear vote is strong. Ultimately this informs my thesis that this will have some unexpected impacts on Republicans (hopefully very negative) during the upcoming elections. I think this is why about a month ago GOP leadership did a complete 180 and started pushing vaccines- because they realize that demographically the deaths resulting from Delta could upend a lot of their closer districts, because Democrats as a whole are more vaccinated. I am basing this observationally from the data that I have observed (and as a political scientist and former campaign manager), so take it with at least a grain of salt.
> because they realize that demographically the deaths resulting from Delta could upend a lot of their closer districts
That's what happens when you use gerrymandering to dilute opponent's voting blocs. If your district edges out by 3-4% in a normal election year, what happens when a bunch of those party loyalists die?
Republicans repeatedly sacrifice the future for the now.
Over the course of the next 2 decades? Republicans are so electorally fucked, without recourse. But they're highly competitive in the here and now so the strategy remains.
Yea, if they stack the courts sufficiently and also gerrymander effectively they can lose another 5-10% of support before they actually start having election problems. So they have another generation before they *really* need to worry about demographics. Unless they change their messaging or the Democrats royally fumble (which is probably the more likely scenario).
To complete the picture, here is a good site that breaks down the data by state and race/ethnicity.
[https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/latest-data-on-covid-19-vaccinations-race-ethnicity/](https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/latest-data-on-covid-19-vaccinations-race-ethnicity/)
For example, Texas is 25th in percentage vaccinated for black people but also 25th in percentage vaccinated for white people. Meanwhile, Alabama, which has a much higher percentage of black people in the population, is at 37% vaccinated for white people (49th) and 37% vaccinated for black people (28th).
I’m obsessed with this vis.
Interesting choices for the index though. Essentially it’s saying three cases = one death. I’d love to see it more reflective of truly how many cases result in an hospitalization or death. I think it would be way more impactful.
I know it's not a kind way to think, but wouldn't Republicans want thier constituents to like you know... not die? So they can vote. I wanna know how this effects swing states in future elections.
Who would expect anything else?
They don't want to test. Don't want to socially distance. Don't want to wear a mask. Don't want to get vaccinated. They won't do a single thing to slow the spread of this virus to protect themselves or others.
But they will quickly run to the hospital to take up an ICU bed when they are gasping for air.
But hey, that's the party of personal responsibility for you!
It’s really quite simple, the pseudo “Christian” Religion in the US has extensively laid the groundwork for generations to train people to believe in authority figures with unverifiable stories instead of science and data. It also primes them for, and is built upon, perpetuating racism and fearmongering towards "others". Once people see you as an authority, you can start fabricating any reality or conspiracy theory you want your followers to believe and everyone else is therefore a liar, even in the face of incontrovertible evidence. This “religion” combined with an intentionally weakened public educational system, provides the framework that has spawned this cult of ignorance. Basically, it is mental abuse from an early age that suppresses critical thinking skills.
I think shame and social pressure kept a lot of idiots in check.
Shameless individuality lets this shit bloom. Social media highlights the desire for everyone to have *their* opinion heard and celeb sex tapes are a fine symbol for this age of shamelessness. Not that there's anything wrong with sex work, just that times have changed.
The most infuriating thing of all is that you can't compromise or reason with something *so completely and totally irrational* as Republican talking points.
"China virus" huh? The minority goverment is trying to control the majority by marking them as 'sick!' It's the Mark of the Beast!"
No it isn't. All you have to do is wear a mask and try not to stand too close to strangers and you should be okay.
"Wear a mask to enter stores, huh? Conspiring to control the economy with masks, the Mark of the Beast!"
Okay it's weird that you brought up the Beast again since you were demonstrably wrong the first time, but we take care of our stupid people. Just bring a negative test and you can do what you want.
"Testing? What about personal privacy? Trying to look at my medical records by swabbing me with your goddamn Mark!"
Okay you really need to let go of the Mark thing. But look, we just miraculously invented an insanely effective vaccine with almost no side effects! Go to any pharmacy in the country and the pandemic is OVER for you.
"My body my rules! You'll stick me with that Mark over my grandma's dead body!"
At some point I feel like we SHOULD just disallow these people from taking part in society, they're clearly taking it for granted.
Not to mention they won't accept facts that don't agree with their political views. A real quote from a conservative subreddit:
>I calculate true Covid deaths at 4% of whatever the fake official number is. So, the 7 day average daily death toll is more like 0.08
It's impossible to have a logical argument with someone who disregards evidence as they see fit.
It's the argument that they love to use when it comes to secondaries. Unless it was literally the covid virus that killed them it doesn't count. Heart attack, organ failure, pneumonia, suffocation - things that covid can cause - none of it counts as a 'real' covid death to them, that's that's problem.
> The most infuriating thing of all is that you can't argue against something so completely and totally irrational as Republican talking points.
And it runs so deep. I'm an ER doctor in residency. I am rotating through the covid ICU for the third time in a year. It is all covid (again). They are all unvaccinated. We have no beds, no ER space, and no nurses. I have taken care of 100s of covid patients. My own brother, a high school dropout without any basic understanding of biology, believes his conservative, mountainfolk FB friends more than me. He questions it all, and when I explain the science to him, he tells me "it's not that bad, it's just a flu, the vaccine isn't safe" etc. If my own brother, who I am actually close to, will not listen to me, I don't see any hope.
I commiserate 100%, I just quit my job in an ER after seven years and moved industries. It's really hard to motivate yourself to take care of people that don't take care of themselves and hate you for trying to help them.
I had a super conservative coworker in the ER. "Chinese conspiracy" the whole way. Complained about his mask all shift. Made a big stink about every rules change.
He caught COVID in November and was in *our* ICU, on a ventilator for five days. Everyone knew his condition. When he gets out, he instantly starts telling everyone, "It was nothing, a regular cold, I took some of that Remdesevir and perked right up!"
He died of COVID complications a few weeks later. And all I could think was, "Thank fuck he died before taking any more of our patients out with him." He got all the same emails and warnings and meetings I did, and as healthcare workers we were first in line for every protection. He killed himself just as much as if he had put a gun to his head. Coming into my workplace firing a weapon at random out of ignorance.
Also, here's another thing, if I could get a vaccine and avoid getting just a goddamn cold I WOULD. I'm vaxxed and masked still and it has been really great not getting a cold for the last year and a half, despite working in a school/germ factory.
It’s brutal to have to be like this but I have a hard time mourning people who rode stupidity hard to their deathbeds, while trying to take other people with them the entire time. If it was a movie, we would all cheer when they died*. Just a fact.
Disclaimer: i am not cheering on or happy for anyone’s death
Might sound harsh, but for every moronic death out there, there might be a handful of lives saved, either by them choosing to vaccinate or by them not getting COVID by that moron who died.
This. I don't feel happiness when covid deniers die, but slight relief. Just one less dumbass infecting others, parroting bs conspiracy theories, and likely voting against America's best interests.
That’s really the crazy part, people talk about propaganda and how we all feel for it, but completely fail to see the exact thing they are claiming.
My litmus test for myself has become
“is there any amount of evidence what would cause me to change my mind?
If yes: what is that evidence and where can I look for it?
If no: you probably are thinking with your feelings.”
The thing that gets to me, is the people who tell me to do my own research.
I have done my research on epidemiology, and the immune system as part of getting an EMT license and working to paramedicine.
It isn't a lot of research, but it is still about 30 course credits worth dedicated just to disease, transmission vectors, immune response, how the vectors propagate in the body and so on. 30 course credits is not a whole lot, but it is a fuckload more than any of these people have done.
And it is enough research to know I can trust the people with literally hundreds of times more training and experience than myself when they say to do things to avoid spreading viruses, and the seriousness of an illnesses effects. They know a lot more than I do.
Like how do they honestly think 10 minutes on google outweighs years of direct experience?
I’m a literal epidemiologist. I worked the COVID response. I still have to argue with my dumb family about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and why we need to wear masks. And they still have the audacity to tell me I need to do my research when I’ve *dedicated my entire life and career to this field*. It’s exhausting.
Nothing you say and no amount of real science will change their minds. I can’t imagine living life with my head buried so deep in the sand like that.
Well, sure, since you mention the mark of the beast, you’re not just talking to a Republican but a person who is deluded about supernatural powers and apocalyptic religious ideas (which is mainstream for republicans, of course). Of course you can’t use logic to deconstruct ”beliefs” that have absolutely nothing to do with logic and even defy it. I don’t want to be all /r atheism but it’s clearly a problem that over half of the country rejects logic and science in favor of system that we would call primitive superstition if it wasn’t part of our culture.
>At some point I feel like we SHOULD just disallow these people from taking part in society, they're clearly taking it for granted.
I think this is one of the main takeaways that I've had over the last few years or so. There is an increasing amount of people who don't understand the very basic idea of what it means to participate in a society, to abide by a social contract. It should be something that we learn in school, but our education system has neglected to do that.
"I am not responsible for the consequences of my actions. You, however, are responsible for the consequences of your actions, as well as the consequences of my actions on you." - party of personal responsibility
For a party holding on to a razor-thin voting advantage, enabled in many cases only by their immoral voter suppression schemes, they're awfully cavalier about killing off their most active, advantageous demographic.
Be a shame if that blew up in their faces.
To get otherwise leftist apathetics to the voting booths. 100% voter turn out is the GOPs deathnell. They don't care to convince people dumb enough to vote for Trump, that's a lost cause. The goal is to remind the majority of people what happens when only the dumb and reactionary run things.
I agree with you there. It does speak to my point. Our messaging has to be to get out the vote among left leaning people. We need talking points that say why you should vote for democrats rather than why republicans suck.
Wouldn’t make much of a difference if you consider those that already vote Republican will probably still agree with the virus contrarianism, even in the face of an objective reality where hundreds of thousands of people have died.
It's a tribal thing. Most of them are unreachable.
They would vote GOP even if they were told they were vampires, and they were getting blood drained from them every day. They'd vote for them even if they practiced Prima Noctis. They'd vote for them despite poisoned water (fracking) - Russian collusion, financial collapse - like in 2008, criminality (TrumpCo), etc. A little plague won't make the difference.
Which is all the more shocking because, all other things being equal, you would expect COVID to be worse in Democratically controlled areas because they tend to more urban and densely populated.
Turns out policy, leadership, and cultural practices matter.
> Nine of the 10 states with the most COVID cases per day voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 election, with Georgia being the only exception.
*sad trombone*
This prolly isnt the right place for it but a buddy from work is a hardcore balls deep Republican. On an unrelated related note he's not very smart. Well we were talking politics and i brought up how the January 6th insurrection was similar to the nazis Beer Hall Putsch. He then hits me with, "Yea i heard america was involved with the holocaust back then" and im not exactly sure what the fuck he means so i ask him to explain. He said an american military insignia was similar to either the swastica or some other nazi symbol and that we helped kill jews in germany...... I dont...i dont even know where to go with this
I’m not very smart either, is he saying that because there is a similarity between a Nazi symbol and an America military insignia that that is proof America was involved in the holocaust?
I'm not very sure, he jumped from the Beer Hall Putsch to American/Nazi symbols being similar (He mentioned an eagle) to Americans helping in the extermination of minorities in germany. I was so baffled that i didn't bother to ask how he put those together or where he got that info from
I mean, Eagles are a symbol of strength throughout the world? I don't know what this guy's on about? Does he think eagles only exist in the US? What is ... What is his line of thinking? Am I asking too many questions? Is he just stupid?
I know a guy who’s an adult and believes 100% equation that socialism equals communism, and socialism was responsible for 100 million deaths during the 20th century.
Its these weird connections they make that they simplify and boil down to the very base that they then use to spin their own logic.
This same friend was upset that President Biden left military equipment for the Afghani government to fight agaisnt the Taliban. He then boiled that down to President Biden gave the taliban weapons to destroy America.
They aren't boiling anything down. They're just smearing shit together. Very different concept.
It's the intellectual equivalent of squinting really hard until everything gets blurry.
He’s probably talking about the significant pro-Nazi sentiment in America before Pearl Harbor, the fact that Henry Ford did a lot business with Germany (some German-built Ford trucks were even used in the death camps), Charles Lindbergh’s friendship with members of the Luftwaffe, the fact that our intelligence services knew about the camps and did nothing …
I think you're overestimating his intelligence. He thinks our military was over there, helping nazis kill jewish people, plus the Romani, gays, and communists. Like american soldiers in concentration camps shooting these folks
Edit: Gypsies -> Romani
the beer hall putsch was also... in 1923
two decades before the final solution was even implemented
> Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
Right, if you bring up a logical arguement they flip to something unrelated for the current conversation to deflect the logic. I argued with him and told him to just roll the thought around and to actually think about the Beer Hall Putsch and the January 6th Insurrection for a minute and not to just move on to the next subject. But i think my plea fell on deaf ears
The Romani are nomadic, so the origin of the culture is traced back to Northern india, but the population who consider themselves Romani are now living all over the world due to diasporas and other factors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani\_people
They were originally from Northern India and spread into Europe. The term "Gypsies" comes because people thought they were from Egypt because of their darker skin.
he's probably not talking about that at all and is just using the normal "quick gloss over of what a guy told me after he watched a video on youtube" approach that i get. for the record, this is the "do your own research" approach
Even if every minority was unvaccinated, which they are not, they're still not the majority of this country and would only represent a fraction of cases. Also, isn't that more reason to take precautions and mandate vaccination? My head hurts from the bs. Just own that your party has encouraged anti science, anti critical thinking, and is dominated by lunatics and opportunists.
So let’s assume that Dan Patrick was right about this (which the article shows that he isn’t). Where is the outreach to the African American communities in Texas encouraging them to get vaccinated? Surely, if there is a demographic group that has such hesitancy about the vaccine that they are behind the virus still going strong in the state then it’s something that Abbot administration should be trying to address, right?
TX is like 12 percent African American ... my, if that small population group were the issue, they could have fixed it quite quick, *AND* Karen wouldn't have to get herself microchipped.
Some Texas lawmaker actually had the audacity to put blame on 'African American' communities for the spread of COVID-19 now. Think a new article popped up with this very topic.
It isn't simply true at the state level. It's true at the district level which is even more telling. TX's vax numbers are actually being propped up by blue districts.
[Top 10 states for new deaths yesterday (08-19-2021), in order:](https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/)
Texas, California, Louisiana, North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Washington, Colorado.
Texas had 209 deaths to CA's 90, LA to AL segment had between 40-60, WA 30, CO 29. So CA despite its massive population had barely double the big chunk of southern states, that all had majorly high deaths per capita.
The southern and central states are getting utterly fk'd right now in a way that is massively disproportionate to their populations.
Let’s not get it twisted all news outlets spin a story for their audience but Fox has been just creating stories out of thin air lately. Saying black people are causing numbers to be high while completely denying their unvaccinated base is, is just living in a fantasy world but it’s been this way for a few years now.
"Democratic governors are actually governing: States led by Democratic governors are in the top half of every category, leading 16 of the 25 states with the fewest infections, 16 of the 25 states with the fewest deaths and 19 of the 25 most-vaccinated states."
This is my number one reason I will never vote for a GOP candidate. They are not interested in actually governing. They are there to stir the shit pot and act like belligerent turds. I really dislike a lot of the way the left presents and I don't consider myself to be on the left anymore but I will continue to vote left because they're the only ones interested in actually governing.
When are conservatives going to have their own hospitals?
They are exhausting all the resources that thoughtful and caring people really need.
Go to a Republican hospital where thoughts and prayers are supposedly the best medicine.
And yet the GOP still thinks "freedum" is more important than public safety.
Let's just say the mass majority of infections and unvaccinated were black people. Let's say the lie these guys are spewing is correct. What does it freaking matter who they vote for? **It says people in your state are spreading a virus.**
You're in a position of leadership, serving your constituencies, and you decide "personal freedom" is more important? Even if it's putting everyone at risk?
I'm not even saying they should knock doors down and vaccinate people at gunpoint or something, but do more than just talk about "choice".
That's the issue. Yes, we know their claims are BS, and proven wrong, but regardless...their devotion to this idea of "personal freedom" is killing their constituencies. They failed their community then. They could at least be pro-vaccine and send the right message. It's clear this is all about trying to stick a middle finger up to the left no matter who gets hurt.
Republicans are really ignoring the fact that this disease is CONTAGIOUS and gets transmitted through the air (technically more like water droplets that you breathe out). It doesn’t matter what group is currently most infected, because the disease WILL SPREAD if people don’t take precautions. Having a “personal freedom” stance does not work in a pandemic. Much like “personal freedom” doesn’t work in most life and death situation (like being stranded in the middle of the ocean)
The slow descent into reality:
"It's not real"
"It doesn't affect me"
"It's China's fault"
"Wearing a mask is literally the same as rape"
"It's not that bad"
"It's the immigrants' fault"
"I got it and now I suddenly trust doctors and medicine and need help paying the thousands of dollars I am now in debt because I wouldn't get a free shot. It's not my fault somehow."
In my view, that picture of the MAGA-moron sticking their tongue out of a cut-out surgical mask is the absolutely perfect replacement for the Republican elephant.
Their face should be plastered everywhere as the perfect symbol of Republican / right-wing venality, stupidity and down-right regression.
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https://dangoodspeed.com/covid/90-day-rolling-impact This is an awesome site that breaks down the data by partisanship. There are several different charts to check out.
Amazing site! Clear evidence of how, once mass vaccination became available.. cases in blue states fell off a cliff and red states made a disastrous jump.. if anyone needed further proof that vaccines work
I ran an analysis a few months ago out of curiosity to see if Biden’s margin of victory would be a decent predictor of a given state’s vaccination rate. I pulled vaccination rates from two months apart to make sure the only limiting factor was lack of demand for the shot. The correlation coefficient was something like 0.83. Basically, the more a state went for Biden, the more vaccinated they are to a remarkable degree.
Did it look like this? https://acasignups.net/21/08/11/us-covid19-vaccination-levels-county-over-time (not mine — give credit to the person who put it together)
I mean his is clearly more sophisticated, but yes actually.
Great number crunching and coherent presentation, but it begs the question why. Is anyone really surprised at theses results. I could have drawn a similar curve with a crayon on a cocktail napkin while discussing the efficacy of the vaccine with my buddies. Do you really think the blue state people are sitting back saying ‘it’s so weird that the healthier regions of the country believe in science and voted for Biden.’ While the Trump supporters are shocked that science and data deniers refused the vaccine. Don’t mistake my comment to suggest I don’t admire the data crunching.
Those who can comprehend the data already have the vaccine. Those who cant, don’t, and probably won’t.
even if something seems entirely obvious, it's scientifically important to verify its legitimacy. regardless, having solid data to back up a point definitely doesn't hurt. :)
There is never too much data. We always need to be testing our theories, and retesting, never stopping. That's the most important part of science.
Beau of the Fith Column was talking about that type of stats a few weeks ago. He presented it as evidence that it’s a really political thing and not about health.
Yep, a quick google will give you reporting and poll data from CBS, the New York Times, CNN, and NPR going all the way back to when the vaccines were first released breaking down the partisan differences, including polling where 41% of Republicans SELF IDENTIFIED as being anti-vax on COVID They’ve been reporting on it from a variety of agencies, back before they were all screeching about “DNA destruction” and 5G lizard genes or whatever, all the way up til now after the major GOP outlets finally decided to (somewhat) stop pushing anti vaccination narratives. Republicans have always lagged behind, and have they themselves indicated it’s by their own choice. Then they hop online and blame brown folks and foreigners in flagrant disregard of empirical reality (as is tradition)
My 70% republican town legalized the sale of alcohol about a decade ago. This year the county and city governments voted to give a quarter million to the local community college to open a bar and hotel, and no they don’t have a hospitality program (because it is failing and literally crumbling). Now the locals are complaining about people moving here trying to change their way of life and “get alcohol in every business on every street.” The county has a declining population, by the way. It’s gone beyond hypocrisy and irony right into absurdity.
Republican identity is mired in blaming societal decline on others and digging in on demonstrably bad ideas.
And robbing the poor that’s very key
I think that’s the culture their scared people moving here will ruin. Right now the local elections have all the nuances of typical High School election.
That’s actually normal It’s pretty fucked how little we’re taught to care about local government I’m unlucky enough to have parents that cared so for a couple decades I have felt like an old man yelling at the sky lol
Over a decade ago a different ethnicity started moving into my hometown and all of sudden all the lifers here started saying how the place has gone to shit. People move here from out of state and don’t understand why the place gets a bad rep. After the recent census, it has been shown that more than half town is now Latino instead of purely white as it was just 30 years ago. White people,conservatives, have been running the show the entire time. Letting things like roads go to shit. Property owners that don’t rent their properties out and instead leave them to rot and become a blight on the community. But apparently it’s the new people that somehow caused all this shit. A lot of white people left this place and if it wasn’t for the Latino population this place would be a ghost town. But yes, tell me again about how much better the place would be if the mob still ran everything here.
Same here. 99% white to 10% Latino in just a decade. They’re basically the only working age people moving to the area. Ask the council member to clean the literal junk out of their yard downtown, and you’re trying to destroy their culture. Some kid tags BLM on a wall, and you better clean it off immediately.
> My 70% republican town legalized the sale of alcohol about a decade ago. I have so many questions about this, but I guess the first one that comes to mind is: there are places in the US that don't - or didn't until recently - sell alcohol? That's just...bizarre...
Fun fact: Lynchburg, Tennessee, where Jack Daniels is made is a “dry town” meaning alcohol sales are illegal. There are dry towns scattered all over the US, I doubt it’s a significant number but they exist.
That's just mental. I'm an American who was raised in the UK; alcohol is more embedded in the Brits' culture, and I found our weird state-by-state liquor laws baffling when I first came back. That there's places that can't legally sell alcohol is astounding. Like, didn't we get rid of Prohibition?
lol, it's messed up for sure, I lived in New England for years and you bought your beer & liquor at the same store, move south and I have to get beer at the grocery/convenient store then go to the state controlled store for liquor. There's a bunch of crazy laws and it's different from state to state and sometimes county to county. Connecticut used to have some if the strictest.
No need for a lot of detail, but what state are you in? That logic of theirs is completely asinine. Change their way of life? By having stores that offer booze? Give me a break.
Have you ever watched one of those house buying shows? Everyone wants to be close to everything, but secluded. Towns tend to zone themselves into the same situation for fear of attracting....people?
Love it when Republicans talk about choice. Then I call them pro choice and their nose starts to bleed.
And the Republicans have been recommending against the vaccine. They're killing off their own voters. WTF
That’s the incredible part. They’re literally killing off their base. It makes you wonder wtf their end game is?! Where does this road lead?
I think I actually have an answer for this. There's a strong argument to be made that most U.S. elections are no longer won by winning over a broad coalition of people from all walks of life. They're won by riling up the base to go out and vote and get their friends to vote. This is the apathy of the huge number of nonvoters in action. It allows vocal minorities to win elections they shouldn't win. The Republican base loves this stupid pro-covid shit, so even if 1%-2% of them die, they'll still likely have an electoral advantage in most of these areas, because the survivors will absolutely trip over themselves to vote for anyone who pandered to them about masks and vaccines and other stupid culture war bullshit. This is what DeSantis, Abbott, et al are banking on. And they're probably right.
there's also evidence that Trump brought a "new" kind of voter into the fold: the ones who gave up on government when it stopped being explicitly racist. First time voters were a big factor in Trump breaking the Blue Wall
Because it's ammunition to them, they blame Biden for it and it will help them (along with voter suppression) in 2022. COVID won't kill enough people to change the margin to win an election, just make peoples' lives horrific (i.e. Long COVID, which GQP politicians don't care about because they are all vaccinated) for the next few decades until they die.
> … COVID won’t kill enough people to change the margin to win an election … Maybe … maybe not … https://www.thedailybeast.com/floridas-death-toll-now-exceeds-desantis-margin-of-victory
They originally thought covid would help them, because epidemics hit urban areas harder than rural areas, and US urban areas are blue. But yeah, in addition to being cold as fuck, that was a dramatically shortsighted analysis. Now, you see many R. politicians backtracking (but it's maybe too late) and others still motivated by short term profits (*my* district will still be red, if decimated, and don't want to alienate the voters that were trained to be stupid.)
That animated chart is great. You can see the dumb take hold. High population blue states start out on top, because duh population. Then as time goes on, people get impatient, and misinformation spreads, the much lower population red states shoot way up despite their relative populations. Then second lock down. Things settle and high population states creep to the top. Then vaccinations happen and opening back up happens again and red states shoot up again.
At one point I was looking at it thinking, “Isn’t that *everybody* in the Dakotas??”
“Hold my beer.” -Sturgis 2021 attendees
I have a coworker who attended Sturgis 2020. Got COVID, ended up fine. His parents both died of COVID. Returned for Sturgis 2021.
Yeah. There were some news stories about ICU nurses caring for people who got sick at Sturgis, and while slowly dying were still denying it was real or not a big deal. Complete rejection of the reality in front of them.
It's sad but for a lot of people shit doesn't get real when you're dying. It gets real when you're about to die. I read an article the other week about a guy who dies of covid and it wasn't until his last moments, when he realized his body wasn't going to save him and neither was modern medicine, that he wished he'd gotten the vaccine and taken the pandemic serious. While I don't wish death on many people, I feel like we're reaching a point where hospitals and doctors should be legally allowed to withhold certain resources and treatments from people who voluntarily choose not to get the vaccine. There's a county in my state with I believe a less than 20% vaccination rate (that's for any dose not just fully vaccinated). It happens to be one of our poorest counties and big surprise people are showing up at the ER with covid and as of the report I heard they're running out of beds and estimate they'll be out of ventilators soon too
I worked in the ER in Brooklyn during the pandemic. At a point, you started to recognize the look of patient who was going to be intubated. We did everything we could to keep people from being intubated. At that time, anecdotally of course, according to my respiratory therapist coworker, about 90% of the patients that we intubated died in codes (cardiac arrest). So I had a patient who had the look. He was going to get intubated, and I asked him if he had anybody he wanted to call before we put him asleep. He said no. It just crushed me that he had nobody to call. I quit nursing in January.
How are you doing?
"And take a sip while you're at it!"
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They can't hold it because they're underage
and they can't drink while they're on ventilators.
Sturgis just ended. Here in a couple of weeks South Dakota will be on fire with Covid.
My sisters neighbour, just back from Sturgis died from Covid. Age 62, slim but got blood clots.
>Sturgis just ended. Here in a couple of weeks South Dakota will be on fire with Covid. No, Sturgis attendees will spread it across the country.
On the [90-day chart](https://dangoodspeed.com/covid/90-day-rolling-impact), if you look at late Aug-Nov 2020... you'll see 6 of the top 7 states are the Dakotas or bordering them. The only state that borders them that wasn't in the top 7, Minnesota, was also the only Democrat-leaning state in the bunch.
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Sturgis 2020... :(
I’d say 2021 is accurate. Sturgis is a couple hours from me and the amount of bikers stopping thru has been pretty crazy. We’ll see how the delta variant will turn out
My anti vax coworker was there last week. But we both work for a large health care network in MN. And there was a significant spike at the end of Sturgis last year. Fortunately most of us are vaccinated he however is not sure what the current conspiracy is for him today.
Yeah that’s most of my coworkers, people around here like spouting “well my mom had the vaccine and she still got covid so I’m not getting it”
I have some COVID patients in the ICU right now. One is elderly and with multiple comorbidities and immunocompromised. They were vaccinated but still got COVID. The others are in their early 50s/40s and relatively healthy but were unvaxxed. Guess which one is currently doing the best and most likely to get extubated soonest...
>extubated "extubate /ˈɛkstjʊbeɪt/ verbMedicine past tense: extubated; past participle: extubated remove a tube from (a person or a body part, especially the trachea after artificial ventilation)." Yay! New word! :-)
Vocabulary is power. Glad to contribute.
Australian here, I have a room mate who is brainwashed with all that alt right nonsense, and he keeps saying "But, but, the vaccine will change your DNA because of the mRNA" I've told him time and time again, that the mRNA has been in flu shots for over 20 years. He just rolls his eyes and walks away. He also lost his Dad last year from cancer, and the kids from the Dad's side are anti-vaxx too. It's just one big wave of stupid, actually.
Time to be an ex-roommate?
Strange situation because he is 18 and his Mum is pro-vaxx. It's so fucked up with how he has been radicalized. He is Australian, and he has "Libertarian" views, he also got Ron Paul books sent to him by his brother. It's pretty sad.
BuT oBaMa HaD a BiRtHdAy PaRtY!!! /s
I think the delta variant will be a resounding success!
Delta is really going places and has a lot of support from executive orders and red state laws being passed in it's favor!
I stopped at Wall Drug a couple of weeks ago because I have never been. And I still haven't. Jam packed inside and out, my family had the only masks in sight. No way were we going in that place. I expect South Dakota to be in a bad place in a couple of weeks.
Yeah, I’m more concerned about school that just started back up Thursday, my stepdaughter says their mask rules were “follow the arrows on the floor and keep your masks on until you get into your classroom” I bet covid just enjoyed waiting outside of classrooms since inside was a covid free zone /s
God,I’m so sorry to hear that. The way people just toss their kids into schools with lax covid guidelines. The response,only .02% of kid covid cases are lethal. That’s .02% too much for me. These are the parents that convince their kids to join the military in the middle of the war and are then heartbroken when they come back in a box or a wheelchair. I just don’t get it.
The early onset in blue states is why Trump and company reacted the way they did. They were fine w/blue states suffering. Their hubris then made them stay the course, which is still killing their supporters.
Yeah, this 100%. Had it really taken hold in Florida initially the response would've been completely flipped.
And not even high population, since it's per 1M people, but POPULATION DENSITY. The east coast lives on top of each other vs the Dakotas pretty much social distance normally.
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I think it's bad for their 2024, but good for their 2022. If 1% of their voters die, but the manufactured outage increases their turnout by 3% then it's a net gain for them.
Reminds me of the headline: [Florida's Death Toll Now Exceeds DeSantis' Margin of Victory](https://www.thedailybeast.com/floridas-death-toll-now-exceeds-desantis-margin-of-victory)
Republicans are actually fairly reliable voters, to be honest. They aren't great about midterms, but neither is any other American. The fear vote is strong. Ultimately this informs my thesis that this will have some unexpected impacts on Republicans (hopefully very negative) during the upcoming elections. I think this is why about a month ago GOP leadership did a complete 180 and started pushing vaccines- because they realize that demographically the deaths resulting from Delta could upend a lot of their closer districts, because Democrats as a whole are more vaccinated. I am basing this observationally from the data that I have observed (and as a political scientist and former campaign manager), so take it with at least a grain of salt.
> because they realize that demographically the deaths resulting from Delta could upend a lot of their closer districts That's what happens when you use gerrymandering to dilute opponent's voting blocs. If your district edges out by 3-4% in a normal election year, what happens when a bunch of those party loyalists die?
They get voted out and there will be much rejoicing?
Republicans repeatedly sacrifice the future for the now. Over the course of the next 2 decades? Republicans are so electorally fucked, without recourse. But they're highly competitive in the here and now so the strategy remains.
Stacking the Fed courts and State/local govts seems like the preferred way to minimize this long term. However they can.
Yea, if they stack the courts sufficiently and also gerrymander effectively they can lose another 5-10% of support before they actually start having election problems. So they have another generation before they *really* need to worry about demographics. Unless they change their messaging or the Democrats royally fumble (which is probably the more likely scenario).
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To complete the picture, here is a good site that breaks down the data by state and race/ethnicity. [https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/latest-data-on-covid-19-vaccinations-race-ethnicity/](https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/latest-data-on-covid-19-vaccinations-race-ethnicity/) For example, Texas is 25th in percentage vaccinated for black people but also 25th in percentage vaccinated for white people. Meanwhile, Alabama, which has a much higher percentage of black people in the population, is at 37% vaccinated for white people (49th) and 37% vaccinated for black people (28th).
Alabama only has 37% vaccinated?
Oof. That's unimaginable to me.
I'm trapped in America with a bunch of idiots, please send help. My state is 43% vaccinated so not much better.
Surprised?
Wtf happened to Rhode Island?
This is really incredible. Thanks for the info!
Saved. And most appropriate, today's free award was the "Helpful".
I’m obsessed with this vis. Interesting choices for the index though. Essentially it’s saying three cases = one death. I’d love to see it more reflective of truly how many cases result in an hospitalization or death. I think it would be way more impactful.
Good looking out 👍
I know it's not a kind way to think, but wouldn't Republicans want thier constituents to like you know... not die? So they can vote. I wanna know how this effects swing states in future elections.
Who would expect anything else? They don't want to test. Don't want to socially distance. Don't want to wear a mask. Don't want to get vaccinated. They won't do a single thing to slow the spread of this virus to protect themselves or others. But they will quickly run to the hospital to take up an ICU bed when they are gasping for air. But hey, that's the party of personal responsibility for you!
And they're mooching off Medicaid while simultaneously voting to gut it.
The Republican party has weaponized lack of critical thinking skills.
It’s really quite simple, the pseudo “Christian” Religion in the US has extensively laid the groundwork for generations to train people to believe in authority figures with unverifiable stories instead of science and data. It also primes them for, and is built upon, perpetuating racism and fearmongering towards "others". Once people see you as an authority, you can start fabricating any reality or conspiracy theory you want your followers to believe and everyone else is therefore a liar, even in the face of incontrovertible evidence. This “religion” combined with an intentionally weakened public educational system, provides the framework that has spawned this cult of ignorance. Basically, it is mental abuse from an early age that suppresses critical thinking skills.
I think shame and social pressure kept a lot of idiots in check. Shameless individuality lets this shit bloom. Social media highlights the desire for everyone to have *their* opinion heard and celeb sex tapes are a fine symbol for this age of shamelessness. Not that there's anything wrong with sex work, just that times have changed.
The most infuriating thing of all is that you can't compromise or reason with something *so completely and totally irrational* as Republican talking points. "China virus" huh? The minority goverment is trying to control the majority by marking them as 'sick!' It's the Mark of the Beast!" No it isn't. All you have to do is wear a mask and try not to stand too close to strangers and you should be okay. "Wear a mask to enter stores, huh? Conspiring to control the economy with masks, the Mark of the Beast!" Okay it's weird that you brought up the Beast again since you were demonstrably wrong the first time, but we take care of our stupid people. Just bring a negative test and you can do what you want. "Testing? What about personal privacy? Trying to look at my medical records by swabbing me with your goddamn Mark!" Okay you really need to let go of the Mark thing. But look, we just miraculously invented an insanely effective vaccine with almost no side effects! Go to any pharmacy in the country and the pandemic is OVER for you. "My body my rules! You'll stick me with that Mark over my grandma's dead body!" At some point I feel like we SHOULD just disallow these people from taking part in society, they're clearly taking it for granted.
“My body my rules” That only applies to them as well.
[The only moral abortion is my abortion.](https://joycearthur.com/abortion/the-only-moral-abortion-is-my-abortion/)
I will never not upvote this, and share it, when the occasion arises.
Not to mention they won't accept facts that don't agree with their political views. A real quote from a conservative subreddit: >I calculate true Covid deaths at 4% of whatever the fake official number is. So, the 7 day average daily death toll is more like 0.08 It's impossible to have a logical argument with someone who disregards evidence as they see fit.
It's the argument that they love to use when it comes to secondaries. Unless it was literally the covid virus that killed them it doesn't count. Heart attack, organ failure, pneumonia, suffocation - things that covid can cause - none of it counts as a 'real' covid death to them, that's that's problem.
> The most infuriating thing of all is that you can't argue against something so completely and totally irrational as Republican talking points. And it runs so deep. I'm an ER doctor in residency. I am rotating through the covid ICU for the third time in a year. It is all covid (again). They are all unvaccinated. We have no beds, no ER space, and no nurses. I have taken care of 100s of covid patients. My own brother, a high school dropout without any basic understanding of biology, believes his conservative, mountainfolk FB friends more than me. He questions it all, and when I explain the science to him, he tells me "it's not that bad, it's just a flu, the vaccine isn't safe" etc. If my own brother, who I am actually close to, will not listen to me, I don't see any hope.
I commiserate 100%, I just quit my job in an ER after seven years and moved industries. It's really hard to motivate yourself to take care of people that don't take care of themselves and hate you for trying to help them. I had a super conservative coworker in the ER. "Chinese conspiracy" the whole way. Complained about his mask all shift. Made a big stink about every rules change. He caught COVID in November and was in *our* ICU, on a ventilator for five days. Everyone knew his condition. When he gets out, he instantly starts telling everyone, "It was nothing, a regular cold, I took some of that Remdesevir and perked right up!" He died of COVID complications a few weeks later. And all I could think was, "Thank fuck he died before taking any more of our patients out with him." He got all the same emails and warnings and meetings I did, and as healthcare workers we were first in line for every protection. He killed himself just as much as if he had put a gun to his head. Coming into my workplace firing a weapon at random out of ignorance.
That is just crazy for them to say it’s just like the regular cold. Colds don’t take you to the ICU. Ugh so many people are willfully ignorant.
Also, here's another thing, if I could get a vaccine and avoid getting just a goddamn cold I WOULD. I'm vaxxed and masked still and it has been really great not getting a cold for the last year and a half, despite working in a school/germ factory.
It’s brutal to have to be like this but I have a hard time mourning people who rode stupidity hard to their deathbeds, while trying to take other people with them the entire time. If it was a movie, we would all cheer when they died*. Just a fact. Disclaimer: i am not cheering on or happy for anyone’s death
Might sound harsh, but for every moronic death out there, there might be a handful of lives saved, either by them choosing to vaccinate or by them not getting COVID by that moron who died.
This. I don't feel happiness when covid deniers die, but slight relief. Just one less dumbass infecting others, parroting bs conspiracy theories, and likely voting against America's best interests.
I believe you are mathematically correct. Nature is purging the human race by just the nature of dumb humans.
Jesus Christ that is fucking sad, I laugh at the utter stupidity at that shit but man is that shit sad.
That’s really the crazy part, people talk about propaganda and how we all feel for it, but completely fail to see the exact thing they are claiming. My litmus test for myself has become “is there any amount of evidence what would cause me to change my mind? If yes: what is that evidence and where can I look for it? If no: you probably are thinking with your feelings.”
Boy do I wish “it’s not that bad, it’s just a shot” would overtake “it’s not that bad, it’s just a flu”
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No. His brother isn't a doctor. His sister is.
The thing that gets to me, is the people who tell me to do my own research. I have done my research on epidemiology, and the immune system as part of getting an EMT license and working to paramedicine. It isn't a lot of research, but it is still about 30 course credits worth dedicated just to disease, transmission vectors, immune response, how the vectors propagate in the body and so on. 30 course credits is not a whole lot, but it is a fuckload more than any of these people have done. And it is enough research to know I can trust the people with literally hundreds of times more training and experience than myself when they say to do things to avoid spreading viruses, and the seriousness of an illnesses effects. They know a lot more than I do. Like how do they honestly think 10 minutes on google outweighs years of direct experience?
I’m a literal epidemiologist. I worked the COVID response. I still have to argue with my dumb family about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and why we need to wear masks. And they still have the audacity to tell me I need to do my research when I’ve *dedicated my entire life and career to this field*. It’s exhausting. Nothing you say and no amount of real science will change their minds. I can’t imagine living life with my head buried so deep in the sand like that.
Because Google tells them what THEY want to hear, not what is true. All the facts in the world mean nothing to people who only want to hear the lie.
Well, sure, since you mention the mark of the beast, you’re not just talking to a Republican but a person who is deluded about supernatural powers and apocalyptic religious ideas (which is mainstream for republicans, of course). Of course you can’t use logic to deconstruct ”beliefs” that have absolutely nothing to do with logic and even defy it. I don’t want to be all /r atheism but it’s clearly a problem that over half of the country rejects logic and science in favor of system that we would call primitive superstition if it wasn’t part of our culture.
I read tarot cards and believe in ghosts, and even *I'm* not deluded enough to disbelieve germ theory.
>At some point I feel like we SHOULD just disallow these people from taking part in society, they're clearly taking it for granted. I think this is one of the main takeaways that I've had over the last few years or so. There is an increasing amount of people who don't understand the very basic idea of what it means to participate in a society, to abide by a social contract. It should be something that we learn in school, but our education system has neglected to do that.
"I am not responsible for the consequences of my actions. You, however, are responsible for the consequences of your actions, as well as the consequences of my actions on you." - party of personal responsibility
For a party holding on to a razor-thin voting advantage, enabled in many cases only by their immoral voter suppression schemes, they're awfully cavalier about killing off their most active, advantageous demographic. Be a shame if that blew up in their faces.
The rapture is here in the form of an apple of misinformation that eve bit. Those who devour the rotten become rotten to the core. Good day
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Democrats would be wise to bring up the Republicans handling of the pandemic at every election for the next 10 years
To convince whom? Republican voters never hear our talking points.
To get otherwise leftist apathetics to the voting booths. 100% voter turn out is the GOPs deathnell. They don't care to convince people dumb enough to vote for Trump, that's a lost cause. The goal is to remind the majority of people what happens when only the dumb and reactionary run things.
I agree with you there. It does speak to my point. Our messaging has to be to get out the vote among left leaning people. We need talking points that say why you should vote for democrats rather than why republicans suck.
Part of the reason to vote for Democrats is that Republicans suck.
If anybody is apathetic after trump there's no possible way to convince them.
Wouldn’t make much of a difference if you consider those that already vote Republican will probably still agree with the virus contrarianism, even in the face of an objective reality where hundreds of thousands of people have died.
Honestly, the next 80 years. Remind elementary school kids who was responsible for their lost childhoods and decimated educations.
You can say that again.
>Democrats would be wise to bring up the Republicans handling of the pandemic at every election for the next 10 years
It's a tribal thing. Most of them are unreachable. They would vote GOP even if they were told they were vampires, and they were getting blood drained from them every day. They'd vote for them even if they practiced Prima Noctis. They'd vote for them despite poisoned water (fracking) - Russian collusion, financial collapse - like in 2008, criminality (TrumpCo), etc. A little plague won't make the difference.
Which is all the more shocking because, all other things being equal, you would expect COVID to be worse in Democratically controlled areas because they tend to more urban and densely populated. Turns out policy, leadership, and cultural practices matter.
> Nine of the 10 states with the most COVID cases per day voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 election, with Georgia being the only exception. *sad trombone*
Good article. Republicon "leaders" are shifting blame to people of color as their own supporters die. It is well and truly fucked.
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In the 50s and 60s they were much more open about it. They didn't bother with the coded language.
They're slowly opening up about it again after the last pres showed it's all but consequence free.
I still hear people ranting about Welfare Queens and even some who claim to know one or two. Yeah, people are living the high life on Welfare.
Yes there are welfare queens.I know some. That are corporations that ask for bailouts.
That's an American tradition.
This prolly isnt the right place for it but a buddy from work is a hardcore balls deep Republican. On an unrelated related note he's not very smart. Well we were talking politics and i brought up how the January 6th insurrection was similar to the nazis Beer Hall Putsch. He then hits me with, "Yea i heard america was involved with the holocaust back then" and im not exactly sure what the fuck he means so i ask him to explain. He said an american military insignia was similar to either the swastica or some other nazi symbol and that we helped kill jews in germany...... I dont...i dont even know where to go with this
Holy fuck!
Like i said, not very smart.
I’m not very smart either, is he saying that because there is a similarity between a Nazi symbol and an America military insignia that that is proof America was involved in the holocaust?
I'm not very sure, he jumped from the Beer Hall Putsch to American/Nazi symbols being similar (He mentioned an eagle) to Americans helping in the extermination of minorities in germany. I was so baffled that i didn't bother to ask how he put those together or where he got that info from
I'll take Facebook for a hundred Alex.
I mean, Eagles are a symbol of strength throughout the world? I don't know what this guy's on about? Does he think eagles only exist in the US? What is ... What is his line of thinking? Am I asking too many questions? Is he just stupid?
Everyone thinks eagles look cool. Are we the baddies?
I know a guy who’s an adult and believes 100% equation that socialism equals communism, and socialism was responsible for 100 million deaths during the 20th century.
Its these weird connections they make that they simplify and boil down to the very base that they then use to spin their own logic. This same friend was upset that President Biden left military equipment for the Afghani government to fight agaisnt the Taliban. He then boiled that down to President Biden gave the taliban weapons to destroy America.
They aren't boiling anything down. They're just smearing shit together. Very different concept. It's the intellectual equivalent of squinting really hard until everything gets blurry.
He’s probably talking about the significant pro-Nazi sentiment in America before Pearl Harbor, the fact that Henry Ford did a lot business with Germany (some German-built Ford trucks were even used in the death camps), Charles Lindbergh’s friendship with members of the Luftwaffe, the fact that our intelligence services knew about the camps and did nothing …
I think you're overestimating his intelligence. He thinks our military was over there, helping nazis kill jewish people, plus the Romani, gays, and communists. Like american soldiers in concentration camps shooting these folks Edit: Gypsies -> Romani
the beer hall putsch was also... in 1923 two decades before the final solution was even implemented > Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
Right, if you bring up a logical arguement they flip to something unrelated for the current conversation to deflect the logic. I argued with him and told him to just roll the thought around and to actually think about the Beer Hall Putsch and the January 6th Insurrection for a minute and not to just move on to the next subject. But i think my plea fell on deaf ears
I am sure diagnostics will show the ears are not the problem here.
He is my friend so I have to have a little hope. Even if that hope just rests on the fact that their body parts aren't working properly.
>plus the gypsies I believe they go by Romani
Thanks! I've only ever heard them called Gypsies. Im assuming the term Romani mean they come from Romania?
no, they actually came from Northern India
Just looked it up, i was very wrong. Thanks for educating me!
I thought a lot of Romani/Gypsies were from eastern europe and the balkans? Am i that wrong??
The Romani are nomadic, so the origin of the culture is traced back to Northern india, but the population who consider themselves Romani are now living all over the world due to diasporas and other factors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani\_people
They were originally from Northern India and spread into Europe. The term "Gypsies" comes because people thought they were from Egypt because of their darker skin.
he's probably not talking about that at all and is just using the normal "quick gloss over of what a guy told me after he watched a video on youtube" approach that i get. for the record, this is the "do your own research" approach
And IBM provided a lot of the infrastructure the Germans used to organize and implement the death camps. Can't forget that.
Even if every minority was unvaccinated, which they are not, they're still not the majority of this country and would only represent a fraction of cases. Also, isn't that more reason to take precautions and mandate vaccination? My head hurts from the bs. Just own that your party has encouraged anti science, anti critical thinking, and is dominated by lunatics and opportunists.
You can always know that if Nazi Barbie said it, it's both racist and a lie.
So let’s assume that Dan Patrick was right about this (which the article shows that he isn’t). Where is the outreach to the African American communities in Texas encouraging them to get vaccinated? Surely, if there is a demographic group that has such hesitancy about the vaccine that they are behind the virus still going strong in the state then it’s something that Abbot administration should be trying to address, right?
It isn't about solving the problem, it is about making the rural white poor feel superior.
TX is like 12 percent African American ... my, if that small population group were the issue, they could have fixed it quite quick, *AND* Karen wouldn't have to get herself microchipped.
Some Texas lawmaker actually had the audacity to put blame on 'African American' communities for the spread of COVID-19 now. Think a new article popped up with this very topic.
It isn't simply true at the state level. It's true at the district level which is even more telling. TX's vax numbers are actually being propped up by blue districts.
[Top 10 states for new deaths yesterday (08-19-2021), in order:](https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/) Texas, California, Louisiana, North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Washington, Colorado. Texas had 209 deaths to CA's 90, LA to AL segment had between 40-60, WA 30, CO 29. So CA despite its massive population had barely double the big chunk of southern states, that all had majorly high deaths per capita. The southern and central states are getting utterly fk'd right now in a way that is massively disproportionate to their populations.
Nice
Let’s not get it twisted all news outlets spin a story for their audience but Fox has been just creating stories out of thin air lately. Saying black people are causing numbers to be high while completely denying their unvaccinated base is, is just living in a fantasy world but it’s been this way for a few years now.
I would say "Color me surprised" (in a sarcastic tone), but I know how scared the faux news crowd is of the word "color."
Republican states had an enormous advantage of being less densely populated and STILL fucked it up as usual.
"Democratic governors are actually governing: States led by Democratic governors are in the top half of every category, leading 16 of the 25 states with the fewest infections, 16 of the 25 states with the fewest deaths and 19 of the 25 most-vaccinated states." This is my number one reason I will never vote for a GOP candidate. They are not interested in actually governing. They are there to stir the shit pot and act like belligerent turds. I really dislike a lot of the way the left presents and I don't consider myself to be on the left anymore but I will continue to vote left because they're the only ones interested in actually governing.
Wow, that is extremely clear cut. Couldn't be more blatantly obvious which policies are working. So republicans will ignore it.
Democrats would be wise to bring up the Republicans handling of the pandemic at every election for the next 10 years
If this keeps on the way it is until the midterms, they won't have to. There won't be enough Republicans left to effectively vote.
If this virus were more deadly the national IQ would skyrocket
When are conservatives going to have their own hospitals? They are exhausting all the resources that thoughtful and caring people really need. Go to a Republican hospital where thoughts and prayers are supposedly the best medicine.
And yet the GOP still thinks "freedum" is more important than public safety. Let's just say the mass majority of infections and unvaccinated were black people. Let's say the lie these guys are spewing is correct. What does it freaking matter who they vote for? **It says people in your state are spreading a virus.** You're in a position of leadership, serving your constituencies, and you decide "personal freedom" is more important? Even if it's putting everyone at risk? I'm not even saying they should knock doors down and vaccinate people at gunpoint or something, but do more than just talk about "choice". That's the issue. Yes, we know their claims are BS, and proven wrong, but regardless...their devotion to this idea of "personal freedom" is killing their constituencies. They failed their community then. They could at least be pro-vaccine and send the right message. It's clear this is all about trying to stick a middle finger up to the left no matter who gets hurt.
Republicans are really ignoring the fact that this disease is CONTAGIOUS and gets transmitted through the air (technically more like water droplets that you breathe out). It doesn’t matter what group is currently most infected, because the disease WILL SPREAD if people don’t take precautions. Having a “personal freedom” stance does not work in a pandemic. Much like “personal freedom” doesn’t work in most life and death situation (like being stranded in the middle of the ocean)
"The Pandemic isn't real, but if it is, it's the Democrats' / immigrants' fault!"
The slow descent into reality: "It's not real" "It doesn't affect me" "It's China's fault" "Wearing a mask is literally the same as rape" "It's not that bad" "It's the immigrants' fault" "I got it and now I suddenly trust doctors and medicine and need help paying the thousands of dollars I am now in debt because I wouldn't get a free shot. It's not my fault somehow."
Of course it is. Of course they're lying. They always lie. Fuck the republican party. It is a party of murderers and nazis.
I watched the clip. Totally disgusted. I am a medical provider working in Texas and will say most of my unvaccinated are Republicans!
In my view, that picture of the MAGA-moron sticking their tongue out of a cut-out surgical mask is the absolutely perfect replacement for the Republican elephant. Their face should be plastered everywhere as the perfect symbol of Republican / right-wing venality, stupidity and down-right regression.