(2023-09-29) Silver The 2 Key Facts About US Covid Policy That Everyone Should Know

Nate Silver: The 2 key facts about US Covid-19 policy that everyone should know. The goal of this post is to convey two related facts that make for politically inconvenient bedfellows

The facts are these:

• Until vaccines became available, there was little difference in COVID death rates between blue states and red states.
• After vaccines became available, there were clear differences, with red states having higher death rates, almost certainly as a result of lower vaccine uptake among Republicans.

In other words, the vaccines made a real and obvious dent in COVID, whereas the effect of other NPIs — such as school and business closures, filter masks, and social distancing — is much less clear.

the absence of any major differences before the availability of vaccines is also newsworthy.

differences in COVID mortality rates as a result of closures, social distancing, masks and other NPIs.

those other interventions came with costs — enormous costs and disutilities.