Thread by @bansisharma

1. A Non-Partisan Thread On Covid

It may surprise you (considering how intensely I dislike NY Times ethos in general) that I do like a few NYT columnists whom I find to be very thoughtful and insightful (remember Bari Weiss worked for NYT for a while and I loved her columns)...

2. Another one of my favorite NYT columnists is David Leonhardt. I don't always agree with him but I always respect his writing and pay attention to it. He has written a thoughtful column based on some recent polling on Covid that I am serializing in this thread.

3. Two Covid Americas
Covid’s starkly different impact on the young and old has been one of the virus’s defining characteristics. It tends to be mild for children and younger adults but is often severe for the elderly.

4. More than three-quarters of all U.S. Covid deaths have occurred among people 65 and older.

Given these patterns, it seems obvious that older Americans should be more fearful of Covid than younger Americans. Yet they’re not.

5. That’s one of the striking findings from a new poll that Morning Consult, a survey firm, has conducted: Old and young people express similar concern about their personal risk from Covid. By some measures, young people are actually more worried:

6. The most plausible explanation for this pattern is political ideology. Older Americans, as a group, currently lean to the right, while younger generations lean to the left. And no other factor influences Covid attitudes as strongly as political ideology, the poll shows.

7. Across most demographic groups, Americans have broadly similar attitudes toward Covid. It’s true not just of the young and old, but also of men and women, as well as the rich, middle class and poor. The partisan gap, by contrast, is huge:

8. Many Democrats say that they feel unsafe in their communities; are worried about getting sick from Covid; and believe the virus poses a significant risk to their children, parents and friends. Republicans are less worried about each of these issues.

9. Who’s right? There is no one answer to that question, because different people have different attitudes toward risk. An acceptable risk to one person (driving in a snowstorm, say, or swimming in the ocean) may be unacceptable to another. Neither is necessarily wrong.

10. But the poll results suggest that Americans have adopted at least some irrational beliefs about Covid. In our highly polarized country, many people seem to be allowing partisanship to influence their beliefs and sometimes to overwhelm scientific evidence.

11. Millions of Republican voters have decided that downplaying Covid is core to their identity as conservatives, even as their skepticism of vaccines means that the virus is killing many more Republicans than Democrats.

12. Conversely, millions of Democrats have decided that organizing their lives around Covid is core to their identity, even as pandemic isolation and disruption are fueling mental-health problems, drug overdoses, violent crime, rising blood pressure and educational inequality.

13. One area of agreement among Democrats and Republicans is a widespread concern that pandemic disruptions are harming their children:

14. People are right to be worried, too. Three medical groups — representing pediatricians, child psychiatrists and children’s hospitals — recently declared “a national emergency in child and adolescent mental health.”

15. Many Democrats are effectively dismissing these costs and instead focusing on the minuscule risks of Covid hospitalization or long Covid among children.

16. Most Democrats, for example, say they favor moving classes online in response to Omicron, despite widespread evidence that remote school has failed and little evidence that shutting schools leads to fewer Covid cases.

17. Closed schools almost certainly do more damage to children and vaccinated adults than Omicron does.

18. On Covid, both political tribes really do seem to be struggling to read the evidence objectively. As a result, the nation is suffering thousands of preventable deaths while also accepting a preventable crisis of isolation that’s falling particularly hard on children.

The End