Poll of the Day > God I really hope that DeSantis becomes president in a few years.

(+) Yeah! (+)

Oh good. Here I was worried they were going to single-handedly fuel massive outbreaks throughout the rest of the country unless every other province strictly enforced quarantines (like, actually requiring them to stay in hotels for two weeks, not the "please stay home" that is more commonly relied upon) on incoming Albertans.

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Anything other than a gentle suggestion is fascism/socialism.

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https://www.npr.org/2021/08/12/1027222426/palm-beach-florida-school-district-440-students-quarantine-covid

A fucking bicycling circus bear could govern better than Desantis

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Blighboy posted...

Alberta has decided to cancel that decision, because of course they have.

This pandemic has shown so many politicians will make an obviously wrong decision until they absolutely have to back down.

Damn, wasn't even aware yet. Nice.

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Some old friends are finally revealing themselves on facebook. A girl I thought was cool just posted a picture of Bonnie Henry (BC's provincial health officer) with a Hitler moustache. lol I'm tryna be nice to her but it'll definitely turn into a dogpile, considering most people our age in our city are....progressive as shit.

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adjl posted...

https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/the-red-blue-divide-in-covid-19-vaccination-rates-is-growing/

It is indeed a gross exaggeration to say that only Republicans are dying, but across the country, Republicans are falling way behind on vaccination rates. Given that being vaccinated reduces the risk of death by somewhere in the range of 99.5-99.9%, that's going to create a political bias in death rates. Based purely on those numbers (46.7% of democrats vaxxed, 35% of republicans, or 53.3% and 65% unvaxxed, respectively), we can expect roughly 22% more republicans to die of Covid than democrats.

Of course, that's not the full picture (several other factors play into any potential political bias), but it's quite reasonable to predict that more Republicans than Democrats will be dying in the coming months. That's not the virus being biased, that's Republicans biasing themselves to be more vulnerable to it.

As an aside, though, sub-50% for democrats is pathetic, given that they're the ones that are doing the best. Y'all need to step that up.

Other things to consider:
-Republicans are more likely to ignore virus prevention methods like masks or social distancing
-Republicans are more likely to be older, which significantly increases the risk of death or serious complications from COVID.

Even without considering the substantial difference in vaccination rates between the political parties, Republicans are more likely to catch COVID due to their more flippant attitude towards virus prevention methods and more likely to die from it due to demographics.

Honestly, I don't actually think it's going to have the major political impact some people think, at least in terms of the Republican voterbase shrinking as a result of die-offs (620,000 Americans have died from COVID since the pandemic started; even if you pretend that every single one of them was a Republican voter, that's not even 1% of Donald Trump's vote total in the last election), but who knows, maybe it'll be enough to tip the scales in some of the swingier spots of the country.

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Blighboy posted...

Alberta has decided to cancel that decision, because of course they have.

This pandemic has shown so many politicians will make an obviously wrong decision until they absolutely have to back down.

I see there's an announcement in an hour, mostly about back to school. As a teacher I'll need to watch this.

If true that they're backtracking, thank God. My jaw hit the floor when they announced the complete removal of testing, tracing, and isolation a few weeks ago.

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darkknight109 posted...

Other things to consider:
-Republicans are more likely to ignore virus prevention methods like masks or social distancing
-Republicans are more likely to be older, which significantly increases the risk of death or serious complications from COVID.

Even without considering the substantial difference in vaccination rates between the political parties, Republicans are more likely to catch COVID due to their more flippant attitude towards virus prevention methods and more likely to die from it due to demographics.

Indeed. Now, on the flip side, cities tend to lean left, and their increased population density puts them at higher risk of large outbreaks. That's going to offset some of what those other factors contribute. That said, the trend has been for Republican counties to have more cases on average than Democratic ones since a few months after the first wave hit cities like NY, Seattle, and LA, so that obviously hasn't been enough to fully mitigate it.

darkknight109 posted...

Honestly, I don't actually think it's going to have the major political impact some people think, at least in terms of the Republican voterbase shrinking as a result of die-offs (620,000 Americans have died from COVID since the pandemic started; even if you pretend that every single one of them was a Republican voter, that's not even 1% of Donald Trump's vote total in the last election), but who knows, maybe it'll be enough to tip the scales in some of the swingier spots of the country.

Exactly my thoughts. Especially where the Democratic vaccination rate is also still pretty low and therefore can't be characterized as anything close to "Democrats can't die of Covid anymore!", I don't think "all your voters are dead!" should really be treated as anything more than a humourous exaggeration.

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darkknight109 posted...

620,000 Americans have died from COVID since the pandemic started; even if you pretend that every single one of them was a Republican voter, that's not even 1% of Donald Trump's vote total in the last election

Wasn't it down to only a few thousand votes in some states?

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Metalsonic66 posted...

Wasn't it down to only a few thousand votes in some states?

I believe the smallest margin was 12,000, in Georgia (leading to Trump calling up the governor of Georgia and urging him to "find" 12,000 extra votes for him). To date, Georgia's seen just shy of 22,000 deaths, so that could have tipped the scale, but that's an extreme example (and, again, relies on the completely unrealistic assumption that 100% of deaths are Republican). Also, they were just over 9000 at the time of the election, so that still wouldn't have been enough to explain the upset.

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Gotcha

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brb gonna make a quick phone call to killary- i mean hilary

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As of yesterday, fully one-fifth of all new infections in the US were in Florida.

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darkknight109 posted...

As of yesterday, fully one-fifth of all new infections in the US were in Florida.

Florida taking this thing to the next level!

We should just quarantine the entire state at this point. Despite Florida only containing 6.54% of the US population they are producing that many infected people insane.