Support for President Trump increased in 2020 in many of the U.S. counties that lost lives at the highest rate to COVID-19, according to an NPR analysis.
Of the 100 counties with the highest COVID-19 death rates per capita, 68 had a higher proportion of votes cast for Trump this cycle than they did in 2016. This includes both Republican-leaning counties and counties that supported Joe Biden.
"It's surprising to see that the president surged compared to 2016 in the areas that have been hit the hardest by the pandemic," says Thad Kousser, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego.
But Kousser and several other experts stress that many things influence how people vote and that it's currently impossible to tease out what effect high death rates and the pandemic in general might have had on voting. Numerous other factors may have led voters in these places to support Trump.
Of the top 100 counties with the highest COVID-19 death rates, all but six had completed vote counts as of Thursday, when NPR ran this analysis. And the shift toward support for Trump was significant in some cases.
For example, the shift in the vote margin for Trump increased in Starr County, Texas, by 55 points. That's the largest shift toward the president in the U.S., though the county ultimately went for Biden; the county has seen 186 deaths and has a population of 65,000. And in Richmond County, N.Y., Trump's lead over Biden was 9 points higher than it was in 2016; that county saw 1,100 deaths.
Trump's support rose even in the county with the highest death rate per capita in the country: Gove County, Kansas, where there have been 18 deaths out of the town's 2,600 residents. There, Trump's tally increased from a 74-point win against Hillary Clinton in 2016 to a 76-point win against Biden.
Overall, of the top 25% of counties with the highest death rates, two-thirds saw increases in the share of votes cast for Trump.
Kousser notes that teasing out cause and effect with these results is difficult. It's not likely that high death rates caused voters to shift toward Trump, Kousser says, adding that it's "more likely that both of these trends are effects of something different about [these] counties."
For example, "they may have been simpatico with the president's approach to the pandemic," which led people to do things like be less likely to wear masks and impose lockdowns to slow the spread of the coronavirus, Kousser says.
Still, the correlation between high death rates and voting for Trump is worth studying, Kousser says: "[It] shows that the impact of the pandemic on this election was much more complicated than we thought."
The pandemic's impact on voters
It has been well documented that Republicans and Democrats hold extremely different views about the pandemic and Trump's response to it.
Though 41% of voters ranked the pandemic as the most important issue facing the country, according to the AP VoteCast survey conducted by The Associated Press, 73% of those who did so voted for Biden. The second-highest-ranked issue was the economy and jobs, with 28% of voters choosing that issue. Of those, 81% voted for Trump.
Some political scientists say this partisan divide is not surprising.
"What we've seen is over time that the biggest determinant of people's worries about COVID-19 and their attitudes about COVID-19 is not where they live or the COVID-19 deaths in their area, but it is their partisanship," says Shana Gadarian, an associate professor of political science at Syracuse University who has been surveying voters through the campaign. "We know partisanship matters a great deal for people's vote choice."
Americans she surveyed were only slightly more likely to support a ban on large public gatherings, for example, if someone in their family had been infected by the coronavirus. But they were far more likely to support such a ban if they identified as a Democrat, regardless of whether someone in their family had had COVID-19.
Gadarian stresses that "it's not the case that people are totally unresponsive to death and bad things happening in their area."
But "if you are someone who already trusts the president and you trust him to handle the crisis, then you are both not as concerned as Democrats are and you're more willing to trust that he is the person who can keep you safe and keep the country safe from COVID," she says.
Teasing out voter attitudes
Gadarian and others note that many factors influence how people vote. Without more detailed information about the counties where support increased even though the pandemic took a heavy toll, it's impossible to understand cause and effect, says Gary King, a Harvard University social scientist.
"We just don't know what the cause is," King said. "This is a just a snapshot."
It's possible support for Trump would have increased in those counties for reasons entirely unrelated to the pandemic, such as more campaigning or advertising by the president, King says.
"Maybe the people in those areas were Republicans and conservatives and Trump supporters to begin with, and they were increasing their support for Trump, entirely unrelated to the pandemic," King says.
It could also be that places that have strong support for the president also are the most likely to experience more deaths for other reasons, such as their populations having higher rates of risk factors such as older age, other health problems or inferior health care, he says.
It's possible the increased support for Trump among some voters stems from "the gains they believe they've gotten for the economy from the sacrifice they've made through, presumably, refusing to participate in masking and lockdowns," says Danielle Allen, a Harvard University political theorist.
"Having sacrificed, those communities may now be invested in that playbook," Allen says.
And, of course, it's possible that support for Trump would have increased even more in counties that supported him strongly if the pandemic had not hit them so hard.
"We just don't actually know, right?" King says.
But King and others say the effect of the pandemic on voting will be fodder for more in-depth research for years to come, given the historic nature of an election occurring in the midst of one of history's most consequential health emergencies.
"It's a very important research question," King says. "We absolutely want to track that down and figure that out."
A health care worker in Hungary holds a bottle containing remdesivir. ( Zsolt Czegledi/Media Service Support and Asset Management Fund/AP Images)
U.S. innovators have developed an antiviral drug that can be used to treat patients hospitalized with COVID-19, part of Americas wide-ranging response to the global pandemic.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on October 22 approved Gilead Sciences antiviral remdesivir for adults and children older than 12 who are under hospital care for COVID-19. Remdesivir is the first antiviral the FDA has approved to combat the disease.
Todays approval is supported by data from multiple clinical trials that the agency has rigorously assessed and represents an important scientific milestone in the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Stephen M. Hahn, FDA commissioner,said in a statement.
The FDA will continue to approve new COVID-19 treatments as soon as they are found safe and effective, as required under the U.S. Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. The FDA may also issue an Emergency Use Authorization before providing full approval to drugs for which clinical trials demonstrate a minimum duration of safety and compelling evidence of efficacy.
Prior to any approval, the FDA weighs the risks and benefits of a product using rigorous scientific standards. In approving remdesivir, the FDA analyzed data from three randomized, controlled clinical trials that included patients hospitalized with mild to severe cases of COVID-19.
Pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences, based in Foster City, California, says remdesivir will help patients recover faster, thereby preserving scarce health care resources.
Through Operation Warp Speed, the United States is alsosupporting the development of numerous potential vaccines for COVID-19, including several that are in the final stages of testing. The operation has convened government scientists, pharmaceutical companies and others with the goal of developing a safe and effective coronavirus vaccine before the end of the year.
The United States also has invested in preparing manufacturers to bring COVID-19 vaccines to market quickly once theyre proven safe and effective.
Were getting ready so that when we get the good word that we have the vaccine, we have the formula, we have what we need were ready to go, as opposed to taking years to gear up,President Trump said May 15.
By U.S. Embassy Tbilisi | 5 November, 2020 | Topics: Health Issues, News | Tags: Coronavirus, Disease prevention and control, Health Programs, innovation
As health leaders prepare to gather for a virtual session of the resumed 73rdWorld Health Assembly (WHA), WHO has three messages to share.
First, we can beat COVID-19 with science, solutions and solidarity.
More than 47 million COVID-19 cases have now been reported to WHO, and more than 1.2 million people have lost their lives.
Although this is a global crisis, many countries and cities have successfully prevented or controlled transmission with a comprehensive, evidence-based approach.
For the first time, the world has rallied behind a plan to accelerate the development of the vaccines, diagnostics and therapeutics we need, and to ensure they are available to all countries on the basis of equity. TheAccess to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Acceleratoris delivering real results.
Second, we must not backslide on our critical health goals.
The COVID-19 pandemic is a sobering reminder that health is the foundation of social, economic and political stability.
It reminds us why WHOstriple billion targetsare so important, and why countries must pursue them with even more determination, collaboration and innovation.
Since May, Member Stateshave adopted a number of decisionsthe Immunization Agenda 2030, the Decade of Healthy Ageing 2020-2030, as well as initiatives to tacklecervical cancer, tuberculosis, eye care, food safety, intellectual property and influenza preparedness.
The resumed session will discuss a 10-year-plan for addressing neglected tropical diseases, as well as efforts to address meningitis,epilepsy and other neurological disorders, maternal infant and young child nutrition, digital health, and the WHO Global Code of Practice on the International Recruitment of Health Personnel, adopted in 2010.
Third, we must prepare for the next pandemic now.
Weve seen this past year that countries with robust health emergency preparedness infrastructure have been able to act quickly to contain and control the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
The WHA will consider a draft resolution (EB146.R10) that strengthens Member States preparedness for health emergencies, such as COVID-19, through more robust compliance with the International Health Regulations (2005).
This resolution calls on the global health community to ensure that all countries are better equipped to detect and respond to cases of COVID-19 and other dangerous infectious diseases.
NOTE TO EDITORS
TheWorld Health Assembly(WHA) is the decision-making body of WHO, attended by delegations from all WHO Member States.The main functions of the World Health Assemblyare to determine the policies of the Organization, appoint the Director-General, supervise financial policies, and review and approve the proposed programme budget.
The WHA usually takes place in May. This year, given the COVID-19 pandemic, a reduced (de minimis) WHA took place on 18-19 May. The resumed WHA73 will take place virtually from 9-14 November 2020.
The WHA open sessions are webcast:https://www.who.int/about/governance/world-health-assembly/seventy-third-world-health-assembly
WHA73 Agenda and all documents:https://apps.who.int/gb/e/e_wha73.html
List of delegates and other participants:https://apps.who.int/gb/ebwha/pdf_files/WHA73/A73_DIV1REV1-en.pdf
The event will be followed by a resumed 147thsession of theExecutive Board on Monday, 16 November 2020:https://apps.who.int/gb/e/e_eb147.html.
As new COVID-19 cases reached a record for the third consecutive day in Maine, and as fears of uncontrolled community spread mount, a troubling question emerges: Is it too late to reverse course?
The short answer is no, but it will require vigilance.
This is a war, we have to have a wartime mentality, said Robert Horsburgh, an epidemiologist at Boston University. We have to sacrifice, and we should be sacrificing equally. Without that, another lockdown is going to be the next step if things dont improve.
Dr. Thomas Tsai, assistant professor with the Harvard Global Health Institute, said Maine, and the nation, are on the steep part of a sharply rising curve, but public health strategies can still be effective. He said Maine has had a very robust public health response to the pandemic, and has a lot more tools at its disposal compared to the spring.
We can act decisively to control it. A large basket of smaller interventions can be effective, Tsai said. This is within our control to suppress it.
Cases are spiking everywhere. On Wednesday, the U.S. recorded more than 102,000 new infections the first time it has gone over 100,000 since the pandemic began. The nationwide seven-day average is nearly 90,000, an increase of more than 100 percent in the last month, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. To date, more than 9.4 million Americans have been infected with COVID-19 and more than 233,000 have died.
But Maine does indeed have a lot going for it. Even though the states positivity rate the percentage of tests that come back positive has tripled in the last two weeks, its still just 1.5 percent, which is a sign that widespread testing is being conducted and not just on people who are strongly believed to have the virus. Other states have positivity rates of 10 percent or more.
Maine also has a governor, in Janet Mills, who has demonstrated over the last eight months that shes willing to be aggressive with restrictions and safety measures even in the face of criticism and that she will prioritize public health over economic considerations. On Thursday, Mills strengthened her executive order on face coverings to require that they be worn in all public places, regardless of whether people can physically distance or not, following a similar order by Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker.
On Sunday, Mills postponed the reopening of bars and tasting rooms and dialed back the limit for indoor public gatherings. She also removed New York, New Jersey and Connecticut from the list of states whose residents are exempt from either a 14-day quarantine or negative test when they visit Maine.
Dr. Nirav Shah, director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention, was not available for an interview Thursday, but at a briefing Wednesday, he was uncharacteristically somber about the direction Maine is headed. Afterward, he wrote on Twitter that he was out of synonyms for concerning.
On Thursday, he explained why: This degree of community transmission means that face coverings and physical distancing are more important than ever, he wrote on Twitter. Why do I worry? Todays community transmission can become tomorrows outbreaks in places like nursing homes. We all need to do our part to keep them safe.
Hospitalizations and deaths often lag behind cases, and Maine already is seeing hospitalizations creep up. On Thursday, there were 38 people hospitalized, including 17 in intensive care units the highest numbers since early June. One month ago, just nine people were hospitalized and only one in critical care.
Steven Michaud, president of the Maine Hospital Association, said hospitals are bracing for the worst. He said there are two positives now that werent true in the spring: Weve learned how to manage the virus better and more younger people are contracting the virus and their cases typically dont lead to hospitalizations.
There is nothing else thats good about it, he said. Give it a week and we could see the hospitalizations start to ratchet up.
My biggest concern is, back at the beginning, the hospitals basically emptied themselves. They stopped taking everything that wasnt an emergencyprocedure to create capacity. The surge never panned out and thats great, but that led to major financial losses. We dont have empty hospitals now, so if this gets going, the threat is that we could be overwhelmed a lot more quickly.
Michaud also said hes concerned about the impact on rural hospitals, since the recent surge in cases has hit rural areas harder than in the spring. Calais Regional Hospital, he said, recently had to transfer COVID-19 patients to Bangor.
Rick Erb and Nadine Grosso, president and vice president of the Maine Health Care Association, which represents nursing homes and long-term care facilities, shared Shahs concerns about nursing homes.
The greatest predictor of whether COVID-19 will appear in a facility is whether its in the community, so thats the concern as we see this trend of higher cases, Grosso said.
Erb said senior living facilities in Maine are in better shape than they were this spring. They have more personal protective equipment for staff and visitors, although there are still shortages from time to time. They have better access to testing. They are better equipped to isolate residents who may have been exposed to help limit the spread.
But residents of nursing homes remain among the highest risk individuals for complications or death if they contract COVID-19.
Our members have really, to be honest, had the same consistent level of fear, Erb said. Theres not a day that goes by that our folks dont worry about the virus getting in.
Dr. Jabbar Fazeli, medical director for Durgin Pines in Kittery, is dealing with a second COVID-19 outbreak at that nursing home. The first was in May.
The good part is that were more prepared now, he said. We have the supplies we need and access to testing, which wasnt the case last time.
Fazeli also said nursing homes are better equipped to catch cases earlier and to isolate people to limit spread.
The goal is always to keep it out, but once it gets in, that shifts to containment, he said.
Tsai, with the Harvard Global Health Institute, said two keys for Maine in the coming weeks will be compliance with mask mandates and the partnership between the state and Walgreens to roll out 15-minute antigen tests. The rapid tests are a better tool for states because they can more quickly capture asymptomatic cases, and more people can isolate when they are contagious.
Maine is receiving 400,000 rapid antigen tests by the end of the year, with 300,000 in Walgreens, where anyone who thinks they need a test can get one for free. Another 100,000 are being distributed to employers with essential workers, such as in health care facilities, schools, and police and fire departments. The rapid tests, which are manufactured by Illinois-based Abbott Laboratories which has manufacturing plants and a lab in Maine are being distributed nationwide.
We are moving from a reactive testing strategy to a proactive one, Tsai said. The testing technology we have been waiting for has arrived. Through testing, we can now identify more people who are infectious and stop them from spreading the disease.
One major concern about increased community spread in Maine is whether the state will be able to keep up with contact tracing, which helps identify close contacts of confirmed cases. Some states have all but abandoned contact tracing efforts and Shah has acknowledged major challenges, even as his agency has added more staff in recent weeks.
There is a physical limit to how much contact tracing you can do, and some people havent been as forthright, said Horsburgh, the Boston University epidemiologist.
In many cases, a feeling of pandemic fatigue has set in. People are tired or bored or even angry about the fact that things havent returned to normal. In Maine, which did so well over the summer to keep the virus from spreading, the recent trend could be another wake-up call.
I think the point of no return is when you run out of space in hospitals, Horsburgh said. Im afraid were headed in that direction. A vaccine is still a ways off. We need to hunker down and get through the winter.
Michaud, the Maine hospital association president, said he travels a lot for his job and sees a lot of complacency in rural parts of the state, with masks especially.
I feel like were on that cusp, he said. If we quit the gatherings, if we abide by the masking, I think we can keep this at bay. But we are kind of at that tipping point and were seeing how quickly and exponentially this can spread.
Staff Writer Joe Lawlor contributed to this report.
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COVID-19 cases soar in King, Pierce, Snohomish and Thurston counties but death rate hasn't KOMO News
COVID-19 vaccine will likely arrive in December, state's top health official says krcgtv.com
LEXINGTON, Ky. (AP) The University of Kentucky along with two Kentucky hospitals will conduct a clinical trial for a potential COVID-19 vaccine. UK will partner with Baptist Health Lexington and Norton Healthcare in Louisville for Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies phase three clinical study. The study will evaluate Janssens COVID-19 vaccine candidate. A university press release says the clinical trial will require about 60,000 people, including significant representation from people 60 and older. The Kentucky research teams plan to enroll at least 2,000 local volunteers for the trial.
This story is from The Pulse, a weekly health and science podcast.
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts.
In late March, officials in the United States were still talking about the coronavirus lockdown in terms of weeks instead of months. People were wiping down their groceries with disinfectant spray and basically scared to step outside.
It was then that biologist Preston Estep sat alone in a Boston lab with a coronavirus vaccine his team had developed over just a few weeks.
I took a small dose first, he said. You know, I usually do this even with pharmaceutical therapeutics, I always take a small dose first just in case there was some sort of negative reaction.
Estep took maybe a tenth of the total dose, waited a few hours, and then took the rest.
I just felt really good, really positive about taking that first step, taking that first shot of vaccine, he said. And when I say shot, I mean a nasal spritz up the nose. So less dramatic than sticking a needle in oneself.
What drove Estep here, sniffing his home-made vaccine?
It was the way people were dying. He was devastated by the thought of people dying alone.
Basically, older people were being quarantined away from their families, and they were being left to die alone in sealed rooms, Estep said.
Couple that with the rosiest vaccine estimates coming from the government at the time: If everything went right, wed have a vaccine, and a way out of this, in 12 to 18 months.
These were people suffering and dying alone, hundreds, and then thousands of them. And I just couldnt stand the idea that we were gonna wait a year and a half while these sorts of scenarios played out, he said.
Estep is a geneticist by training, not an infectious-disease specialist. But hes Harvard-trained and highly connected in scientific circles. A world renowned geneticist, George Church, was one of the first to take a version of his vaccine.
I had studied with some of the smartest and most capable and amazing scientists in the world, and Id seen people do some pretty amazing things, he said. Ive been up close and personal to some radical breakthroughs and important scientific work thats happened very quickly.
The way he explained it, its not so much that he was convinced he could do something about the coronavirus. More like, he just wasnt convinced he would be totally useless.
He assembled the Rapid Deployment Vaccine Collaborative, RadVac, essentially a posse of scientists that hed known from previous work. Estep said they werent only brilliant, they had a healthy conception of risk calculation. He needed risk takers because, in his mind, self-experimentation was the only way to move faster than the virus.
I knew that we were on uncharted territory. This was previously only sort of a theoretical challenge that was going to hit civilization at some point that there would be a worldwide pandemic, he said. But I knew that my colleagues that I originally reached out to had thought about these kinds of things.
Estep found it wasnt all that hard to get the band back together. Scientists like many of the rest of us had their careers upended by March of this year. A lot of them were out of work or at least cut off from whatever they were researching at the time, thanks to coronavirus restrictions. One of his collaborators had a lab space.
So we had a fully stocked professional biotech lab basically ready to go, that had sufficient equipment, he said.
And they were off.
Look into vaccine development in general and you discover that its not all that hard to create one from a technical standpoint. Its not of the same engineering order as, say, making a nuclear reactor.
Estep found there was already decades-old technology that had been tested in humans that he could use to deliver the vaccine in a nasal spray.
You can form gel nanoparticles that are about the size of a virus that cross the mucous membrane because of both the size and the chemical properties, he said. And it acts as an ideal intranasal delivery vehicle.
There are basically five ingredients to form those particles that are readily available. To elicit an immune response, Esteps team used little bits of artificially synthesized protein that mimic bits of the coronavirus.
It basically all came together very quickly within a week or two, he said. I had a basic design that used these synthetic pieces, these little tiny non-infectious pieces of the virus, that I could order, you know, online.
So if creating a vaccine is the easy part, its testing it that gets tricky. You have to figure out if its safe and effective before distributing it to literally every living human being on the planet.
The only ethical test subject, he figured, was himself.
Since taking that first dose in March, Estep and his collaborators have developed seven more versions of the vaccine, and have tried them all.
So we volunteered ourselves as the designers of the vaccine, Estep said. We decided that the only way to create that rapid feedback loop of design iterations and testing was to use it on ourselves.
Design, test, look for the immune response, improve, design and then repeat. Estep said this model makes him more nimble than the big pharmaceutical groups, able to incorporate more of what is learned about the virus into designs in real time instead of being locked into a vaccine thats months old and that has to go through months-long regulatory and safety hurdles.
What the world calls warp speed the way pharmaceutical giants and governments are working together to create a vaccine in 18 months rather than the usual span of several years to Estep is slow motion.
I think we do need to get a vaccine out as quickly as possible, said Paul Offit, vaccine researcher and director of the Vaccine Education Center at Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia. That said, we need to make sure that the vaccine works and that its safe.
Offit said much of todays vaccine regulation architecture stems from a 1955 disaster known as the Cutter Incident.
Jonas Salk made his polio vaccine in 1955 by taking the virus and inactivating it with a chemical, [and] five companies stepped forward to make it. One company made it badly, Cutter Laboratories of Berkeley, California, he said. They had failed to fully inactivate the polio virus that was in that vaccine. As a consequence, about 120,000 children were inoculated with live, fully virulent polio virus, Offit said. Investigations later showed that the contaminated vaccine had caused about 40,000 cases of polio, in which, about 200 children were paralyzed and 10 children were killed. I think it was probably the worst biological disaster in this countrys history.
Offit said its an unfortunate part of cutting-edge medicine, especially medicine distributed to hundreds of millions of people.
The history of, frankly, medical breakthroughs is littered with those kinds of stories, he said.
The Cutter Incident harmed far more people than others, but Offit mentioned another vaccine from the 60s that looked like a real winner initially. It was from the National Institutes of Health and had great results in animal models, with good initial data all around.
[But] when they put it into a Phase Three [trial], they found the children who got that vaccine were more likely to develop pneumonia, more likely to be hospitalized and, in the case of two children, more likely to die than children who didnt get that vaccine, he said.
All this serves to explain why the safety protocols exist in the first place, Offit said, adding that warp speed doesnt really touch the safety and efficacy hurdles that slow down vaccine development.
Instead, it simply removes much of the financial risk facing vaccine makers.
Theyve said, Look, well pay for the Phase Three trials, which cost hundreds of millions of dollars; well pay for the mass production, even not knowing whether or not the vaccine is safe, not knowing whether the vaccine is effective. Well take the risk for that, he said, with we meaning the federal government. Well make hundreds of millions of doses not knowing whether this vaccine works and is safe, and if it doesnt work and isnt safe, then well just throw those millions of doses away. No pharmaceutical company would ever do that, Offit said.
ANNAPOLIS, Md. (WJZ) Nearly 40 Maryland companies are developing or manufacturing coronavirus vaccines and therapeutics, Gov. Larry Hogan said Thursday during a press conference.
The governor addressed residents after COVID-19 cases grew by at least 1,000 for the second consecutive day and the states positivity rate went up to 4.21% after dropping to below 3% several weeks ago.
Although he said the states health officials are prepared for the second wave of coronavirus and has enough hospital beds, PPE and testing supplies, Marylanders cannot let their guard down.
HOGAN NEWS CONFERENCE UPDATES:
Hogan said more than three dozen Maryland companies are working on vaccines and innovative therapies to treat COVID-19.
Novavax, which added 400 more jobs and was awarded $1.6 billion, is ahead of the group with the development of a coronavirus vaccine.
Hogan said the Maryland Department of Health has submitted a plan to the CDC for how they will order, distribute and administer a vaccine when its made available.
WATCH BELOW: Hogans Full News Conference
For the latest information on coronavirus go to the Maryland Health Departments website or call 211. You can find all of WJZs coverage on coronavirus in Maryland here.
