Thread by @charles_gaba

📣📣📣 NEW: YES, Republicans have been dying of COVID at a much higher rate than Democrats. NO, it’s not even close to 5x higher: acasignups.net/23/01/19/yes-r…

A week ago, a tweet from a supposedly left-leaning Ph.D went semi-viral which claimed that a) 800 Republican voters are currently dying of COVID per day & b) this is 5x the rate of Democratic voters. While the partisan COVID death gap is large, both of these claims are nonsense.

I wrote a couple of threads about this over the weekend, but I've also delved deeper into the issue to look at both a) what the actual data indicates and b) where this *very* specific claim originated.

For this, I've looked at both the @nberpubs study from last fall which has received renewed attention recently via a @VICENews story from November, as well as my own, cruder analysis from last September (which I've re-ran to match up w/the NBER time periods).

I've also included an important analysis by @astokespop & some of his colleagues from last spring which looks at "non-COVID" excess deaths which were likely actually COVID-related.

My conclusion in short: The *actual* red/blue COVID death rate gap is already dramatic enough w/out exaggerating it to extreme proportions.

Oh, yeah:
#GetVaxxed
#MaskUp
#GetBivalentBoosted

As for the *actual* number of GOP voters vs. Dem voters who have died of COVID since the pandemic started, my own estimates (admittedly much cruder than NBER's study) puts it at perhaps ~559K GOP voters vs. ~385K Dem voters as of the end of 2022...or ~45% more GOP voters overall.

NBER's study, by contrast, looks at *excess death rates* in Florida & Ohio during the pre-vaxx period and the post-vaxx period, through the end of 2021. They found GOP "excess deaths" to run 22% higher pre-vaxx and 153% higher post-vaxx, or 76% higher overall.

While the methodologies are different (and I'm sure theirs is far more accurate), the larger point is that NEITHER estimate comes close to 5x higher. It's *possible* that there was a week or two here and there where it spiked that high, but if so it was for a very brief period.