In April last year, as Donald Trump handed the pandemic over to the states to deal with, and then kept Democratic ones from receiving funding for masks and ventilators and PPE, I feared this was all part of a plot to kill Democratic voters. I didn’t tell anyone this because it was a ridiculous, paranoid idea.
So much for self-assessment.
Now, the very opposite is coming true, and not just in my brain. Donald Trump seems to be killing off Republican voters.
Last week across America, cases of the highly transmissible Delta variant rose in 48 states and were stagnant in two. Throughout the land, new COVID cases rose by an astounding 70% in the week, to more than 26,300 a day. Four states accounted for nearly half the new cases, California, Texas, Missouri, and Florida which alone contributed one in every five new cases. All of these states, except California, are solidly Republican.
States that have low vaccination rates have sky-high infection rates. Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas are the only states to have fully vaccinated fewer than 35% of their residents. Average daily case rates in each state were among the 10 worst in the country last week. These, too, are all solidly Republican. In fact, of the 10 lowest vaccinated US states, 9 voted for Trump last November.
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