… economy not dying because of Varient because of vaccinations
The economic recovery in America is continuing on a major scale despite the factor of the Delta Variant that is affecting many areas. However, some new data reveal that the major change in this area is contingent on whether or not the counties in the state have high vaccination rates.
In fact, this data is not new. Most of the Democratic counties in the U.S. are the ones who produce the most goods and have the highest GDP.
Who would have thought?
Bloomberg data
According to data compiled by Bloomberg, the counties that were won by Joe Biden in 2020 have booming economies — because they are vaccinated,
The shift of U.S. economic production toward blue counties predates the arrival of the coronavirus. After the 2016 election, Mark Muro, the policy director of the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Project, found that the 472 counties Hillary Clinton won produced 64% of the country’s economic output, while the 2,584 counties Donald Trump won contributed just 36%. That was a significant jump from the 2000 election, when the blue-red county economic split was 54% to 46%. Muro dubbed this divide “high-output America” vs. “low-output America.”
Last year, after Biden defeated Trump, Muro looked again and found that the economic output divide has grown even more pronounced. The 520 counties Biden won account for fully 71% of U.S. gross domestic product, while the 2,564 that Trump carried produced just 29%. In other words, America’s economic engine is bluer than ever.
The partisan lean of these 520 economically vital counties has almost certainly helped to protect U.S. growth because Democrats are much more likely to be vaccinated than Republicans.
To pinpoint the difference between high-output and low-output America, I asked Muro to compare county-level vaccination data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for blue and red counties. He found that the average share of fully vaccinated people, age 12 and above, in the Biden-voting counties that produce 71% of GDP was 61%, as of Aug. 22, while the share in Trump-voting counties was 46%—a gap that’s grown substantially since April, when vaccination rates in high-output and low-output America were almost the same.
Joshua Green, “Vaccinated Democratic Counties Are Leading the
Economic Recovery, Bloomberg, August 26, 2021
Low vaccination rates “slow the economic recovery”
The red states are being hit hardest by the delta, and the fact that people in these states are rejecting the vaccines is interesting,
“At this point, reduced vaccination rates align very much with 2020 Trump voting across counties, and that—it turns out—aligns very closely with weaker economic performance,” Muro says. “The irony is that low vaccination rates are likely to slow economic recovery.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, the delta wave has hit red America hardest. Nine of the top 10 states with the highest cumulative seven-day case rate per 100,000 residents as of Aug. 22 voted for Trump: Mississippi (840), Louisiana (756), Florida (700), Alabama (525), Tennessee (511), Arkansas (511), Kentucky (511), South Carolina (490), and Alaska (455). Nationally, there were 308 cases per 100,000 people.
The divergence in Covid cases and the effect on economic activity in red and blue counties may be attributable to more than just low vaccination rates. The nature of work in Biden counties vs. Trump counties probably also plays a role. High-tech workers in economic powerhouses such as Los Angeles and Santa Clara counties in California are far better able to shield themselves from infection than, say, meat and poultry processing workers in plants in Iowa or South Dakota.
Joshua Green, Bloomberg, August 26, 2021
Vaccinations rising in red counties
The truth is that the number of vaccinations is rising in red counties, probably because of fear. I chuckle to see some southern friends on Facebook just getting their first shots of the vaccine now. However, now the southerners are starting to fear Covid despite having the macho, crazy-Christian idea that they do not need it and that God will take care of them,
From a strict output standpoint—leaving aside the terrible human cost of Covid—the U.S. is fortunate that so much of its economic activity is concentrated in counties that tend to have high vaccination rates. Biden counties are also far more populous. But there’s potentially good news for Trump-voting counties, too, on both the economic and public-health fronts. As delta has surged, vaccinations are rising to levels not seen since the spring—on Aug. 19 a million doses were administered. And as a recent Bloomberg analysis showed, the sharpest rise in new vaccinations is coming in the red areas that have lagged behind Biden counties.
Joshua Green, Bloomberg, August 26, 2021
So, in short, get vaccinated and see your economy grow.
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