Does the Coronavirus prefer Republicans?

There is an eerie similarity between the states with the highest incidence of COVID-19 coronavirus infection and the states that voted Republican in the recent US presidential election.

I noted that the Worldometer statistics on the Coronavirus in the USA showed that those states with the highest incidence (cases per million of population) seemed to be mostly those states with a Republican leaning in the recent presidential election. In order to test this theory, I sorted the data by state and made a map of the 25 states with the highest incidence of the virus. Those states that voted Republican are highlighted in red and those that voted Democrat are highlighted in green. (You will see why I didn’t use blue for Democrats further down in this article.)

Here is what I got:

States with highest incidence of CORONA-19 Virus.

Then I made a map of the 25 states with the lowest incidence of the virus. I highlighted those that voted Democrat in blue and those that voted Republican in purple.

Here is that map:

States with lowest incidence of CORONA-19 virus.

When I combined the maps together this is what I got:

Counting up the states it seems that of the 25 states with the lowest incidence of COVID-19 virus, 19 states are Democrat leaning and six are Republican leaning. Of the 25 states with the highest incidence of Coronavirus, 19 states are Republican leaning and six are Democrat leaning.

Looking at just the blue and red states above, this looks a lot like the blue and red map of the presidential election results with many of the states in green and purple being among the the states that were considered battleground states in the election. It makes one wonder why? Is it purely coincidence? Or are there sociological differences between the Republican and Democrat leaning states that contributed to lower incidence of the virus in one versus the other?

In order to double check the maps, I added up the total population and total number of cases in Republican leaning states and in Democrat leaning states and calculated the incidence of COVID-19 for each group. For the Democrat leaning states, the average incidence was 30,671 cases per million of state population. For the Republican leaning states, the average incidence was 40,005 cases per million. That would imply that one is 30% more likely to catch the COVID-19 virus in Republican leaning states compared to Democrat leaning states.

It almost appears that the COVID-19 virus prefers to infect Republicans over Democrats. Who would have thought that a virus could have political leanings?

All this aside, I encourage everyone to learn about the Coronavirus and take appropriate steps to reduce the risk of infection for you and your family. If past pandemics are anything to go by, this is going to get worse before it gets better!

Further reading: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/