It is a story as old as civilization: cities are the places where epidemics can emerge most powerfully. Many people in close contact enable contagions to spread readily.
(From an article in the journal BioScience:
Only when communication between small groups of neighboring towns began to be established is it likely that human populations became large enough to sustain direct life cycle bacterial and viral infections. It is in these first cities [more than 5000 years ago] that the now common diseases of humans started to appear. …
It is likely that many of the plagues mentioned in the Old Testament arose when human populations became sufficiently aggregated to sustain epidemics of new pathogens.
And so it is with the coronavirus pandemic: the “hot spots” that have taken off in the United States are metropolitan areas — first Seattle and New York City, now joined by Detroit, New Orleans, Chicago, etc. More sparsely populated areas have built-in “social distancing.”
What this means is that — at least in the opening stages of this pandemic -- the Blue side of the American electoral battle is taking a bigger hit, with the thinning of the ranks of Democratic voters. That’s because in virtually every state, the metropolitan areas trend Democratic and the rural areas trend Republican.
(And compounding that hit to the Blue side, in these early stages of the pandemic, is the bi-coastal pattern of the initial take-off of the virus — with New York on the East Coast, and California and Washington state on the West Coast being the first three states to have large numbers of cases — since the main bastions of the Democratic Party make a bi-coastal pattern, as one can see in the color-coded maps of the Electoral College results in our presidential elections.)
So if we think about how this coronavirus crisis impacts the balance of electoral power between the two political parties, the early advantage clearly goes to the Red/Republican side.
It seems, however, that — perhaps out of some noble sense of fairness — that the Red side is determined to balance things out. Or if it isn’t motivated by a commitment to fairness, perhaps it is out of an ambition to win some sort of collective Darwin Award. (The Darwin Awards“recognize individuals who have supposedly contributed to human evolution by selecting themselves out of the gene pool via death by their own actions.”)
Whatever the motivation, the Republican side — led by their pandemic-denying/minimizing President — has boldly thrown caution (and prudence) to the winds and enabled their followers to make the most of their chances of contracting the virus.
So we see, for example, conservative churches — in defiance of calls to practice social distancing — continuing to call for their congregations to, well, congregate. The results, we can bet, will not be terribly long in coming.
And the results surely were not long in coming with Liberty University, where students were invited back to campus by their Trump-allied university president, where a dozen students apparently developed — presumably avoidable — cases of Covid-19.
Also contributing to the balancing of the political dimension of the impact of the pandemic have been those Republican governors who are eager to show their fidelity to their pandemic-denying/minimizing cult leader in the White House. Prominent among these are the governors of Florida and Texas, who have resisted the nation-wide movement to help “flatten the curve” by refusing to take the recommended measures to keep people separate.
Every bit of delay in taking such measures will mean extra deaths in these Republican governed states.
So as bad as New York’s situation has been (New York is projected to end up with 64,000 deaths from this pandemic), the late-starting Republican-governed states are predicted to far outstrip the mortality in blue New York. Florida — ill-governed by Republican Ron deSantis — is predicted to end up with 320,000 deaths; and Texas, likewise misled by Republican Governor Greg Abbott, is predicted to suffer the loss of 431,000 of its citizens.
(The damage to the Red side is presumably compounded by the fact that it is the elderly for whom the virus is especially likely to be fatal— and, of course, older voters (and, being a white male in my 70s, I cringe when I say this) have been the mother-lode of support for today’s Republican Party.)
The final score is not yet in, of course. It’s not clear just how much the spread can be contained, rather than just delayed. Nor is it clear when vaccines to prevent the disease, or drugs to treat it, might impact the ultimate toll.
But at this point it appears that this virus has started off by attacking mainly the Democratic electorate, but the virus has subsequently shown itself eager to take up the Republicans’ invitation to even up the score.