I’ve seen a lot of overt and unseemly gloating lately about Republicans “killing off their base” because now it’s supposedly rural counties and Republican voting areas where people are getting sick, and so supposedly everyone getting sick is white Trumpers, har har. (Yeah I spend too much time on the bird app, but I’ve seen it here too, in the form of the r/HermanCainAwards profiles of anti-vaxxers hoist by their own petard.) And people waving their hands at Charles Gaba’s numbers and doing some amateur demographically-blind “data science” and gleefully computing how many Trump voters, exactly, might be getting killed off by the COVID-19 pandemic in red counties. It’d be unseemly to be gloating if this were actually a demographic win-in-progress, but I think it’s also probably flat-out wrong. It’s been bugging me so much that I decided to take a look at my own state to try to explain why.
I spend some quality time with the NC-DHHS COVID-19 Dashboards every few days because it’s part of my job at the moment, and one of the things that can be seen there is the trend of who’s hospitalized.
North Carolina is a southern state with a corrupt, hard-right Republican legislature, that was somehow (hard work) able to elect a competent and uncontroversial Democratic governor in 2016 and re-elect him with enough support in the legislature to sustain a veto in 2020. We’ve been fortunate to have amazing leadership at the DHHS as well. We had a real shutdown for the first wave. In the cities, we’ve mostly worn masks throughout the pandemic and there hasn’t been a whole lot of drama about it — maybe because one of the leaders of our ReOpen “movement” made big news with her positive COVID test immediately after the protests started and it kinda made them look extra-stupid at a time when people were taking the pandemic fairly seriously. It’s unclear what all the factors are that have kept us on track here, but no one got caught fomenting a terrorist plot to kidnap Roy Cooper, or drove Mandy Cohen at NC-DHHS out of office with unhinged threats (she stepped down in an orderly transition on Jan. 1 after seeing us through the whole first two years of this). So we’ve been extraordinarily lucky here pandemic-wise, with fewer deaths per capita than other Southern states and even many Northern ones. We’re on par with places like Virginia and Colorado rather than with our deep South neighbors. And we haven’t been hiding our data.
If you were one of the aforementioned liberal trend analyzers, you’d assume based on where our vaccination rates are low (rural counties) that the preponderance of people getting COVID in NC would be angry white guys, right? (We have plenty of them, they showed up in force on Jan. 6 and the Klan has some well known strongholds around the state). You’d assume they would be disproportionately represented in the hospitals relative to the general population. Yet that is not the case. NC is 22% African-American, but the hospitalization data shows that black North Carolinians are showing up closer to 30% in the hospitalization data, persistently. Hospitalization’s a pretty good indicator of who’s getting seriously sick.
Inconveniently, NC does not summarize this statistic over the whole pandemic in its dashboards, but I can spot check days going back throughout the pandemic and whites are never above their weight (70%) in the population as a fraction of hospitalizations. And African-Americans are never underrepresented relative to their population fraction. And this is borne out by the national data as recently summarized by CDC once again, in the figure at the top of this post. Yes, still, after all this time and craziness and progress and vaccinations, the topline demographic outcome is that the pandemic is on average killing nonwhite Americans at more than twice the rate of whites.
If we break out just the health care response regions of North Carolina that fall in the more rural, agrarian Eastern and Southern parts of the state, the part of the state that falls in the multistate area colloquially referred to as the “Black Belt”, where despite the Great Migration, rural counties still have a high proportion of black citizens, we see that the disproportionate hospitalization outcomes are even more stark, with black citizens being nearly 40% of those hospitalized.
The same data is not available for other states that span the Black Belt, at least that I can easily access on this sunny Saturday when I am supposed to not be working, but they’re all of the well known former-Confederate offenders when it comes to crappy COVID policy and rich whites holding a monopoly on political power and using it to hurt everyone else. So I would not be assuming that outcomes there for nonwhites would be better than they are in pandemic-lucky North Carolina. More likely, the white elites that run the government in those states manipulate access to vaccines and testing as precisely, and in the same plausibly-deniable-in-court ways, as they control access to a healthy environment and to economic mobility and to the vote.
People love to rhetorically ask “why are Republican Governors going on with this or that COVID-spreading shenanigan, they’re killing off their base???” Well, because they’re not. They’ve looked at the numbers, and they realize that proportionately, they’re killing more than two black Americans for every one of “their people”. And they’ve decided they’ll take that gamble.
