Elections 2024... Risk averse Democrats vs. risk tolerant Republicans ... Part 1 (Governor DeSantis)

Last update: Tuesday 5/31/22 

This blog note assumes that the pandemic will still be raging during the peak campaign months in 2024. It also assumes that the nation's management of the pandemic will be a critical election issue, right up there with abortion rights, immigration, voting rights, the Big Lie, and all of the other domestic controversies swirling in the stews of our hotter-than-ever political pots. It assumes that votes related to the pandemic will be strongly influenced by each voter's attitude towards pandemic risk, i.e., tolerance vs. aversion. From this limited perspective the election will be a contest between risk averse Democrats vs. risk tolerant Republicans, more specifically, between Democrats who give credence to the CDC's cautious guidance vs. Republicans who are inspired by the anti-mandate postures of Florida's Governor Ron DeSantis, a Yale undergrad. Harvard Law grad, and U.S. Navy veteran. And yes, this note assumes that the governor is preparing to run atop the GOP ticket in 2024 ... if Trump should falter.

If the governor aspires to attain the nation's highest political office, he is likely to make his contrarian management of the pandemic a centerpiece of his campaign because that is what most distinguishes him from the gaggle of other GOP wannabes currently huddling in our ex-president's political shadows. So this two part note will examine some of the pandemic stats that the governor might reference during his campaigns.

Governor DeSantis opposed all mandates

But first, we ask our readers to refresh their memories of the governor's anti-mandate activities by perusing the headline links to a few articles that highlight his implacable opposition. The headlines tell the tales, so the articles don't have to be read:

• "Florida Judge Strikes Down Order Requiring Schools to Physically Reopen Amid Covid-19 Risks", NY Times, 2020
• "Florida’s governor bans agencies and businesses from requiring ‘vaccine passports’",  Patricia Mazzei, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Eileen Sullivan and Isabella Grullón Paz, NY Times, 4/2/21
• "As Covid Surges in Florida, DeSantis Refuses to Change Course", Patricia Mazzei, NY Tmes, 8/6/21 
• "A Florida school board defies the governor’s mask ban.", Melina Delkic, NY Times, 8/15/21
• "As G.O.P. Fights Mask and Vaccine Mandates, Florida Takes the Lead", Patricia Mazzei, NY Times, 11/18/21
• "Contradicting federal guidance, Florida will recommend against Covid vaccines for healthy children", Patricia Mazzei, NY Times, 3/9/22,

Which stats? 

The editor assumes that the governor, a well educated man, is risk tolerant but rational. His policies seem to be based on a few properties of the virus that have remained true for all of its variants. They can be inferred from Table 1, below, whose data was downloaded from the CDC's Case & Death Demographic Trends display on its COVID Data Tracker page.  The table tallies the deaths by age groups for the victims whose ages were known.  

• For the combined share of deaths from COVID for the five youngest age groups in the first five rows of the table, ages 0 through 29, were less than one percent. 
• The combined share of deaths in the next two rows for the 30 to 39 and 40 to 49 age groups represented only 5.9 percent of all COVID deaths
• In other words, less than 7 percent of all COVID deaths were suffered by persons under 50 years of age; 93 percent were over fifty
• The last few rows show that the oldest age groups, 65 and older, suffered 75 percent of the deaths inflicted by COVID.
  

From these facts, Florida's risk tolerant governor might have drawn two conclusions:

• Very few members of the youngest age groups died from COVID, regardless of vaccinations. For K-12 students aged 5 through 17 -- in the table's 2nd, 3rd, and 4th rows -- combined share of deaths were well below one percent.
• Vaccines have been of greatest importance for the oldest members of our society, in the last three rows of the table, who suffered 75 percent of the deaths

Table 1. COVID Deaths by Age Groups 

Source: Data downloaded from CDC COVID Data Tracker's Case & Death Demographic Trends
"Deaths by Age Group" table on 5/6/22

These axioms seem to frame the governor's signature pandemic policies:

• He gave highest priority to enabling residents 65 and over with opportunities to be vaccinated, as stated in a press release in early 2021
  -- "Governor Ron DeSantis: Florida Putting Seniors First and Leading the Nation in Vaccinations for Those 65+", Press Release, Governor Ron DeSantis, 1/23/21
  
  It must be noted that Florida is home for a very large number of educated, affluent retirees from the Middle Atlantic states, especially New York, who needed no mandates to induce them to seize opportunities to become vaccinated as soon as possible, the kind of retirees who would show their gratitude for these high priority opportunities in forthcoming elections.
  
  
• Confident that only a very, very small percentage of school age children would die from COVID, the governor opposed all school related mandates, i.e., masks and moving students from in-class instruction to remote learning
  
  
• Confident that only a small percentage of working adults younger than 65 would fail to recover from COVID infections, he opposed workplace mask mandates.
  
  
• The same confidence energized his opposition to workplace vaccination mandates. The vast majority of employees would recover from infection, but he assumed that those who did not share this confidence would voluntarily become vaccinated as soon as they were eligible. 
  

These considerations would lead the risk tolerant governor to focus on three kinds of statistics: 

• Death rates for school aged children -- If school age children died from COVID, the governor's refusal to mandate masks, remote instruction, and other mediations would have doomed his political ambitions.
• Death rates for 65 and over -- His risk tolerance had to protect the most vulnerable
• Vaccination rates for 65 and over -- Without mandates, he had to continually ensure that the state's most vulnerable residents were receiving the most opportunities to become vaccinated voluntarily.

Well before most other governors and well before Omicron, the governor of Florida regarded infections as the unavoidable costs of living with the virus. Indeed, the headline for one of the articles listed in the first section of this note declared, "As Covid Surges in Florida, DeSantis Refuses to Change Course"

How well did the Governor of Florida do ... by his own standards?

If Florida was the reddest of the red pandemic states, i.e., the most anti-mandate, then California and New York were the bluest of the blue, i.e., the leaders in masks, vaccinations, remote schooling, and other pandemic restrictions. Incidentally, the 2020 U.S. census found that the four states having the largest populations were California, Texas, Florida , and New York, the two biggest reds and the two biggest blues.  Therefore Part 2 of this blog note looks at the CDC's pandemic stats for deaths and vaccinations by age groups for all four states.

Editor's caveat -- The statistics that Governor DeSantis will probably emphasize give no consideration to the potentially catastrophic, non-fatal, but not yet conclusively determined consequences of long COVID. Full disclosure requires that the editor of this blog admit to being an 80 year old, doubly boosted, highly risk aversive, constant wearer of well fitted N95 masks everywhere, and will remain so until new data clarifies the likelihoods of long COVID's worst possible outcomes. Indeed, the risk tolerance vs. risk aversion of the majority of the electorate might be largely determined by their concerns, if any, about long COVID in 2024.

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Links to related notes on this blog:  

• Risk averse Democrats vs. risk tolerant Republicans ... Part 2 (Age groups and vaccinations) ... Last update: 6/8/22