DeSantis Leads The COVID-19 Death Squad

Since April of 2021, the Centers for Disease and Prevention (CDC) has published estimates of the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths among a sample of both vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals. The chart below shows the estimated number of weekly deaths per 100,000 individuals through most of January. The blue line shows the death rate for vaccinated people and the orange line for unvaccinated people.

It is clear the likelihood of dying is much greater for unvaccinated people than for those vaccinated. How much greater varies from week to week.

The next chart shows the ratio of the unvaccinated death rate to the death rate for vaccinated people. This ratio has shown a decline over the months, perhaps as the original vaccines wore off, but has never fallen below ten to one. For instance, the most recent ratio, for January 29 of this year, shows an estimated ratio of 11.2. In other words, an unvaccinated person was 11 times more likely to die than someone who received the full vaccine treatment.

Starting last fall, the CDC started recommending that older people who were fully vaccinated receive a booster shot. The following graph shows the covid death rates for three populations: unvaccinated people (in orange), those with the full vaccination (in blue), and those with the full vaccine plus a booster (in green).

The next chart shows the effect of adding a booster shot to people who are already fully vaccinated. Adding a booster on top of the regular treatment further reduces the chance of dying from covid. The most recent results estimate that an unvaccinated person is 26 times more likely to die from covid as someone fully vaccinated and boosted.

By the end of the year 2020, three spectacularly effective vaccines became available and by the following summer, supplies were sufficient that anyone who wanted one could get fully vaccinated. However, opposition to the vaccine simultaneously exploded along with vaccine availability. Although there were exceptions, this opposition largely centered on the political right.

The next chart compares the percentage of each state that voted for Joe Biden to the percentage of that state’s residents who were fully vaccinated in March of this year. As Biden’s vote goes up (on the horizontal axis) so does the percentage of residents who are fully vaccinated (on the vertical axis). In fact, about 65% of the variation in vaccination rate is explained by the variation in election results.

As often happens, Wisconsin, shown with the large red dot, falls squarely in the middle of this chart. Biden barely edged out Trump in the election and Wisconsin’s 65% fully vaccinated rate is the same as the nation’s. (In addition, 71% of Wisconsin’s population has received at least one dose, compared to 77% of the nation and 36% of Wisconsinites have had the booster versus 29% of the nation.)

The next chart compares the states’ partisan orientation to its total covid death rate per 100,000 residents between July 1st of last year and March 16th of this year. I chose this period because, compared to the first year of the pandemic, vaccines were widely available. In addition, much more was known about how to fight the disease.

As a result, whether someone is likely to catch covid has become more a matter of choice rather than bad luck. As noted above, refusing to be vaccinated vastly increases one’s odds of dying—by about 26 times based on the most recent estimate. As the graph below shows, the higher a state’s percent voting for Biden the lower its death rate.

If refusing the vaccine is highly foolish, politicians who encourage their constituents to refuse the vaccine – including a number of Republican governors — strike me as highly immoral.

Consider the case of Florida and its Republican governor Ron DeSantis. Florida’s vaccination rate is slightly higher than Wisconsin’s (but it has the second-highest percentage of senior citizens in the country, a group that has a higher vaccination rate nationally) and its voting is slightly more Republican. Yet on a per-capita basis Florida’s covid death rate is 60% greater than Wisconsin. Compared to California, its death rate is 160% higher.

Put another way, how many Florida deaths would disappear if Florida had the same death rate per 100,000 residents as Wisconsin or California. Using Wisconsin, 50 more lives per day, or 12,960 to date would have been saved. Comparing Florida to California, 80 more people per day or 21,098 people to date would not have died.

Some of this difference may reflect the fact that Florida has a higher percent of senior citizens, who are more vulnerable to covid. But Maine ranks first nationally in the percent of senior citizens and has a much lower death rate than Florida – about the same as Wisconsin’s. The difference is that Maine, which supported Biden, has a much higher vaccination rate than Florida.

How much of that lower vaccination rate and higher death rate in Florida can be blamed on the policies of Gov. DeSantis? A column by the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank, entitled “how does Ron DeSantis sleep at night?”, offers a number of examples where DeSantis has acted against efforts to damp down covid deaths. These include falsely claiming that “the vaccine could harm women’s fertility, suing to stop vaccine mandates, promoting ineffective cures, blocking rules requiring face masks, scolding mask-wearing kids for ‘covid theater’ and touting misleading statistics.

Trying to assess DeSantis’ responsibility for Florida’s excess covid deaths runs into a chicken and egg problem. It is unclear how much of Florida’s high death resulted from DeSantis’ driving opposition to covid mitigation efforts and how much he simply exploits existing Florida sentiment against masks, vaccines, and other tools aimed at mitigating the virus.

Perhaps the answer is that it is a bit of both. This is a phenomenon that feeds upon itself. Even so, imagine the reaction if DeSantis announced that he favored killing 50 (or 80) randomly chosen Floridians every day. In essence, that’s what his policies have helped cause.

Correction: the original version of this article had an error in the third chart. The left-hand axis should run from 0 to 25 deaths per 100,000, not 0 to 2500.