COVID-19 # 66

The Pew Center produced an interesting graphic showing why COVID-19 has a partisan divide (with Democrats tending to think it is worse, and Republicans not so bad). It turns out that most of the hardest hit Congressional districts have Democratic Representatives:

This is an interesting graphic that's becoming more common. Each Congressional District is represented by a square of the same size. These are grouped into shapes roughly approximating the shape and position of states. Because the population of Congressional Districts are close to equal, this data doesn't have to be scaled.

Since most deaths are in the northeast, and the Democrats are strong in the northeast, 41 out of the 44 hardest hit districts are Democratic.

Here's another interesting tidbit: Democratic districts are getting their death rates under control:

Republicans ... not so much.

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Israel reopened schools a couple of weeks ago. And now they have a superspreader event in a high school, with 103 cases.

Offical figures from Iran indicate they are in a second wave that is nearly as strong as their first wave (which officially peaked around April 1). Dissidents claim that deaths are about 6 times higher than the official numbers.

In other upper level economics classes I'd guess that you talk about "natural experiments" (these are rarer in macro). Well, the U.S. is going through a huge natural experiment right now with all the protests: we're going to find out the hard way how transmissible SARS-CoV-2 is in the open air and sunshine. My guess is ... not very.

Japan looked really bad a month ago. How'd they fix that?

Interesting thread. Japan drove down its cases without large-scale testing/tracing. "Instead, the country focused on finding clusters of infections and attacking the underlying causes, which often proved to be overcrowded gathering spots such as gyms and nightclubs." https://t.co/QGzGFCKnD6

— Tanya Lewis (@tanyalewis314) May 28, 2020

Do you remember a month ago when the models were forecasting 100K U.S. deaths by August. Yeah ... we hit that mark 3 months early ... and people think things are getting better. They are, barely. But mostly what is going on is that people are ignoring the truth. Sorry to have to write that.

China has concluded that the wet market was not the source of the virus.

And in Washington, cases are rising amongst those under 40.