Posts Made By: Rod Kaufman

Originally Posted by Steven Moore

Schork says Arizona is landlocked and has no refineries. He says that means we must rely on fuel coming in through pipelines and that adds costs. Schork says most of the gas comes from California where environmental regulations mean a different, more expensive blend of gas.

Originally Posted by Darian Rachal

Rod, I see that gasoline in your area is about $1.00/gallon more than here($2.59 at Kroger). Actually, I thought it'd be more than just $1.00.

Originally Posted by James Brown

Ah yes, the D's have finally broken the cyclical nature of politics, once and for all.  Jim

Originally Posted by James Brown

Don't fall for the sexy headlines Rod.  The actual study is here:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7587838/

From the study:

Results

From March to early June, Republican-led states had lower COVID-19 incidence rates compared to Democratic-led states. On June 3, the association reversed, and Republican-led states had higher incidence (RR=1.10, 95% PI=1.01, 1.18). This trend persisted through early December. For death rates, Republican-led states had lower rates early in the pandemic, but higher rates from July 4 (RR=1.18, 95% PI=1.02, 1.31) through mid-December. Republican-led states had higher test positivity rates starting on May 30 (RR=1.70, 95% PI=1.66, 1.73) and lower testing rates by September 30 (RR=0.95, 95% PI=0.90, 0.98).

Conclusion

Gubernatorial party affiliation may drive policy decisions that impact COVID-19 infections and deaths across the US. Future policy decisions should be guided by public health considerations rather than political ideology.

Note how the conclusion is not party specific.  Also the conclusion, written by public health experts ignores economic considerations.  Do you think any of the bold headlines will emphasize economic impact or how policy decisions in the D states enhanced the early East Coast death rates?  Those early D policy decisions on the East Coast did exactly that.  So, this study begs the larger question.  I'll concede that R policies enhanced the Covid death rate in the summer and fall.  But how did those states economies fare, compared to their D counterparts?  How does a metric of overall civic welfare compare between these states?  The study does not touch that of course.

I feel compelled to restate my opinion that anyone who will not take the simple measures of masks, distancing, work from home if possible, and getting vaccinated is a real problem.  But opening the economy as in Florida and Texas have seems to be advantageous.  Perhaps there are medical consequences, but the data does not show overwhelming consequences.   In my opinion, whether the CA/NY response or the FL/TX response proves to be better for society on all metrics, health, economic, overall social welfare and so on is an entirely open question.

Jim

Originally Posted by James Brown

p.s.  I understand that this tricky balancing act means that a policy decision might cause some to die, to benefit the economy.  Similarly, another policy decision might save some lives at the cost of businesses, livelihoods,  suicide, drug abuse and decreased general welfare.  Any policy taken to extremes has the potential to cause enormous unintended consequences.   For example a "protect the economy at all costs" policy could overwhelm the health care system, and ruin the economy.  To my knowledge, the governors of all 50 states have avoided overwhelming the health care systems in their jurisdictions.

Jim

Originally Posted by James Brown

We sure did not have that in CO.  Did you have patients in gift shops in CA?

Originally Posted by James Brown

LA County, California.

I'm curious if anyone in the press or any public health experts politicized this occurrence and blamed this travesty on the Democratic governor or mayor?  I wouldn't.  LA lacks adequate hospital beds given it's population and that would be the case even if it were run by Republicans.  Big cities are poorly equipped to deal with pandemics.

This occurrence in California does give us some insight and context to the attack headlines blaming R governors for their policy decisions that started this thread.

Jim

Originally Posted by James Brown

My point is not that every governor played it right.  My point is that based upon the deaths/M metric, there is no indication that D governors have done any better than R governors.  D governors are blue and R are red: