Fact Checking NPR-Reported COVID Mortality
What amount of death is worth what amount of personal freedom?
I started writing (in part) to break away from the echo chamber news feeds. In some of my reading on COVID for a previous letter, I ran across an article from NPR, “Pro-Trump counties now have far higher COVID death rates. Misinformation is to blame” and a follow-up article, “Pro-Trump counties continue to suffer far higher COVID death tolls”. The titles scream spin, and I had to stop for a peek.
The articles referenced a large data set of county level vaccination rates versus COVID mortality. It then cross-referenced those data with county level voting for Trump in the last election. The impression they sought to give was that “misinformed” Trump voters are killing themselves because they believe false vaccination information.
The data presented were extremely noisy, but the articles did provide a tool to search the county-by-county data (real kudos to the authors for including this tool!). I decided to spot check counties in California and Florida where I have family just to see if on the face of it, the NPR story was consistent with the data (and my own experience). Here are the results from 10 counties in FL and CA.
I chose these counties because they are near family in the middle of each state. I chose 5 Trump-leaning and 5 Biden-leaning, and these are the first 10 I chose. Vaccination rates do appear correlated with lower deaths. Yet, there is a significant difference between this relationship when comparing the states against each other. This state-to-state difference overwhelms the relationship between deaths and vaccinations within each state.
The population-weighted average of the vaccination rates in the FL counties was higher than the CA counties (78.7 vs 73.6%), and yet a person is 3X more likely to die in Florida than California. The population-weighted Trump support for the 5 counties in Florida was less than 50%, again suggesting something other than voting for Trump explains the difference between deaths in these counties. COVID is killing Floridians at a far higher rate than Californians!
Is this an example of echo chamber news? Belief in misinformation may be impacting vaccination rates. And vaccination rates are impacting mortality. The decrease in mortality with vaccination within each state is consistent (increasing vaccinations by 1% decreases mortality by 1.6 and 1.9 in FL and CA, respectively). However, the difference in mortality between Florida and California is far greater than is explained by vaccination rates.
I don’t have an answer for what is driving the deaths of Floridian at higher rates than Californians. In this case, Floridians appear to have vaccinated at greater rates than Californians, so “misinformation” could not be the culprit.
Mask and closure mandates would certainly be top candidates for causal factors, particularly since mask and closure policy were controlled at the state level for both Florida and California. I would also bet that Floridian lifestyle choices led to a higher mortality rate than Californians who lived under greater state-wide restrictions.
The real question is why? Why would a person choose to live a riskier lifestyle in the face of a higher mortality rate? And would Californians have done the same had they been given the choice?
Maybe we are just playing a game of statistics without meaning? 0.0942% (Florida mortality) is three times larger than 0.0328% (California mortality), but it is still a very small number. If the average person knows just 600 people, then the average person in Florida or California would not actually know someone who died of COVID. The lack of personal connection for most people might lead towards more risky behaviors.
So is the NPR reporting echo chamber spin? They certainly spun the data – Trump = Misinformed = Death is their take-away message. Trump voters may be vaccinating at lower rates than other voters, which would lead to greater mortality rates. Yet, in this case the state-to-state differences in mortality are far greater than the vaccination rate differences. Misinformation is not the driving differences in mortality between these Florida and California counties.
I believe NPR missed the larger story of why people are choosing to live in states that have higher mortality rates to this disease.
On this Memorial Day, it might be a fair question to consider - What amount of death is worth what amount of personal freedom?