Easy prey

The above cartoon is from February -- Pence is featured because Trump had just put him in charge of the US coronavirus response -- and I think we can all agree that it was prescient.  Despite the hard work and dedication of doctors and nurses at great personal risk, the virus found the US an easy target due to Trump's negligence and incompetence, and to the irresponsibility of the "stupid one-third" of the US population.  After eight months, the pandemic is still out of control in much of the country, and with 4% of the world's population we've suffered 22% of the deaths (and that's probably an undercount).

It's of some interest, though, where in the US the disease is hitting hardest.  This map shows number of cases per state relative to state population size (rather than absolute numbers), so it shows the actual level of severity:

With three exceptions (Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota), the states in the hardest-hit category are all solid Republican.  That's superficially surprising because most of these states are heavily rural, with scattered populations.  California, New York, Oregon, Washington, etc. have most of their populations concentrated in dense urban areas which should be more susceptible to a highly-infectious disease like covid-19.  Yet it's states without that vulnerability which are suffering the most.

The reason, of course, is that the factors that made the US easy prey for the virus -- bad leadership and mass stupidity -- are especially evident in the red states.  Blue states at least mostly have competent governors who took effective action as the Trump regime stonewalled, and populations sensible enough to observe the recommended precautions once the danger became obvious.  Red-state governors failed to act or lifted restrictions too early, while all too many of their inhabitants trusted talk radio, pastors, and Trump for information rather than scientists and doctors, and disdained masks and social distancing.  These errors far more than offset the advantage of thinly-scattered population, leaving them with higher per-capita rates of infection than the densely-packed coastal cities.

Elections have consequences.  So does behavior.