Red and blue

David Leonhardt, writing in The New York Times Morning Newsletter:

There simply was not a strong partisan pattern to Covid during the first year that it was circulating in the U.S.

Then the vaccines arrived.

They proved so powerful, and the partisan attitudes toward them so different, that a gap in Covid’s death toll quickly emerged. . . .

The brief version: The gap in Covid’s death toll between red and blue America has grown faster over the past month than at any previous point.

One remarkable detail:

Charles Gaba, a Democratic health care analyst, has pointed out that the gap is also evident at finer gradations of political analysis: Counties where Trump received at least 70 percent of the vote have an even higher average Covid death toll than counties where Trump won at least 60 percent.

Looking at counties in Illinois, I can see that that’s so. It’s a death cult, really.