Pro-Trump counties continue to suffer far higher COVID death tolls

Even with widely available vaccines and newly effective treatments, residents of counties that went heavily for Donald Trump in the last presidential election are more than twice as likely to die from COVID-19 than those that live in areas that went for President Biden. That's according to a newly-updated analysis from NPR, examining how partisanship and misinformation are shaping the pandemic.

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NPR examined COVID deaths per 100,000 people in roughly 3,000 counties across the U.S. from May 2021, the point at which most Americans could find a vaccine if they wanted one. Those living in counties that voted 60% or higher for Trump in November 2020 had 2.26 times the death rate of those that went by the same margin for Biden. Counties with a higher share of Trump votes had even higher mortality rates.

The scale of the preventable loss of life is staggering. According to a recent analysis by Brown University, nearly 320,000 lives nationwide could have been saved if more people had chosen to get vaccinated. The Brown analysis also shows a partisan split in how those preventable deaths are distributed. States that went most heavily for Trump – including Wyoming and West Virginia – have among the highest rates of preventable deaths, while states that voted heavily for Biden – such as Massachusetts and Vermont – had among the lowest.

According to the CDC, vaccinated individuals are 10 times less likely to die from a COVID-19 infection than the unvaccinated.

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