Regional Variations in COVID are SEASONAL, not Correlated with Party of the Governor
If you want a pointer towards the seasonality of the COVID virus, check out the NY Times per capita case map for the US for today: (hat tip to boriquagato@substack.com)
This looks like a weather map, not a map of Trump v. Biden voters or party affiliations or anything else. COVID is seasonal, just like other respiratory viruses, and waxes and wanes in certain areas due to weather factors and how they affect the behavior of humans (eg how much the weather forces them indoors). There appears to be no correlation here to mask wearing, lockdowns, quarantines, school closures, motorcycle rallies, wearing of garlic or burning of witches.
Three months ago the south was a hotspot and all these other places were moderately dormant. The prior attempts to attribute that earlier southern hotspot to party affiliation of the governors now seems about as valid as the Boxers blaming Chinese droughts on Christian missionaries (I like the Boxer analogy because the cornonabro's confidence that crappy paper and cloth masks will protect them from the virus reminds me of the Boxer's beliefs that special exercises and spells would make them immune to bullets).
By the way, this is cases, which was always an awful metric because of the way we do testing. My hope is that with a milder Omicron variant, shift in infections to healthier younger people, and a lot of vaccination (which seems to reduce the seriousness of getting the disease more than it prevents infection) we will be seeing much lower death figures this year for the same number of cases.
