Preventable COVID Deaths: A Failure of American Ideology
The other day I ran across this article commemorating the dubious milestone of one million U.S. deaths from the pandemic. A table in the article lists the "preventable deaths per million adults" for each state.
I counted down to the Arizona slot, finding us 36th places down from the best. Wait a minute, I thought, isn't that the same ranking Arizona had among states for percent fully vaccinated the last time I calculated it? Why yes, yes it is.
Is that a coincidence, or do these preventable death numbers line-up with vaccination percentages for all the states? To find out, I took the vaccination percentages on April 13th (data from JHU Dashboard with Arizona rate corrected) and plotted those against the preventable deaths numbers in the above article:
The percent vaccinated accounts for about two-thirds of the variance in the preventable deaths (adjusted r-squared = 0.679). A regression analysis says that for every increase of one percent in vaccination rates, preventable deaths go down by 41.3 per million.
In the study that yielded the preventable deaths numbers shown in the article, they scaled that up to the U.S. overall and concluded:
In a national analysis of three counterfactual scenarios of higher-than-observed full vaccination rate, we find that that increased vaccination in the U.S. could have potentially averted approximately 178,000 to 318,981 deaths between January 1st, 2021 and April 30th, 2022.
The population of Tempe, Arizona is near the middle of that range (207,982). A Tempe-full of people needlessly died because COVIDiots, led by the COVIDiot in Chief and his sycophants, refused to take a vaccine that has been proven safe and effective over billions of doses.
There is something uniquely American about this "fail" on vaccinations. The New York Times noted in a recent piece that Australia is similar to the U.S. in almost all respects except population. Demographics are strikingly similar: same median age, similar percentages living in rural vs. urban settings, both are English speaking wealthy countries, both have abundant international travel. Australia also has a robust right wing as part of their politics—after all the Murdock family, which owns Fox News, is Australian.
Yet Australia has one-tenth the number of deaths as the U.S., when adjusted for population. What is going on? The NYT article boils it down to "a lifesaving trait that Australians displayed from the top of government to the hospital floor, and that Americans have shown they lack: trust, in science and institutions, but especially in one another."
In the U.S. we are fond of thinking of ourselves as exceptional. In this realm we are exceptional alright, exceptionally bad, and it's shameful. The Guardian calls it—rightly in my view—a failure of American ideology.
Image by Ralphs_Fotos from Pixabay
