Artist’s rendition of SARS-CoV-2 viruses/Wikimedia Commons
A lesson from the pandemic
A study published this week by the Journal of the American Medical Association’s (JAMA) Open Network is reporting that the rollout of the first Covid-19 vaccines in 2020 eased the fears of many, especially Democrats, in these unUnited States.
And then they died.
The data in the study comes from 18 million social media posts written by 2 million users in 3,065 counties surveyed for expressions of fear, joy and anger.
What to make of it, the authors don’t really say, other than to observe that their “findings suggest that collective emotions are conditioned by local sociopolitical contexts.”
Duh.
That’s pretty much a no-brainer. And it’s quite possible the decline in fear and the increase in deaths is simply an odd correlation with no real meaning at all.
On the other hand, it’s plausible that once people were vaccinated, some of them thought they were ‘safe’ from Covid and, as a result, began associating more with others, with the end result being an increase in infections and associated deaths.
Who knows.
In a country where everything is now about politics left and right, Americans will no doubt be able to argue about this at length. You can almost hear some ‘conservatives’ now claiming the vaccines helped kill a bunch of them damn ‘liberals.’
Yee-haw!
On the contrary
But the fear-down, deaths-up for Democrats data here is at odds with another JAMA study from July 2023 that reported the pandemic hit Republicans much harder than Democrats, apparently because of vaccine hesitancy the part of the former.
“After May 1, 2021, when vaccines were available to all adults, the excess death rate gap between Republican and Democratic voters widened from −0.9 percentage points to 7.7 percentage points in the adjusted analysis,” the study said. “The excess death rate among Republican voters was 43 percent higher than the excess death rate among Democratic voters.”
The authors of that study said it was adjusted for age differences, but age clearly played a role in who lived and who died among the 538,159 registered voters in Ohio and Florida surveyed for the study.
“The analyses stratified by age showed that Republican voters had significantly higher excess death rates compared with Democratic voters for two of the four age groups in the study,” the authors wrote. “The differences for the age group 25 to 64 years were not significant.
“Democratic voters had significantly higher excess death rates compared with Republican voters for the age group 65 to 74 years. The analyses stratified by state showed that differences in excess death rates between Republican and Democratic voters were primarily seen in voters residing in Ohio, with smaller, and generally nonsignificant, differences in weekly excess death rates between Republican and Democratic voters in Florida.”
There’s a lot to unpack there.
The age groupings for the study were 25 to 64, 65 to 74, 75 to 84, and 85 years or older. The median age of the dead was 78. Florida was one of the most visibly vaccine-hesitant states in the nation. The study provided no data on the fitness of any of those studied.
And in a pandemic of the old and physically unfit, fitness might fully explain all the differences. The study authors themselves conceded that “there are plausible alternative explanations for the difference in excess death rates by political party affiliation beyond the explanatory role of vaccines discussed herein.”
One could start there with adjustments for socioeconomic status and race, where the Covid-19 data shows obvious differences among the dead, and then maybe add in corrections for lifestyle behaviors after retirement.
“Working-class voters,” or what we used to call “blue-collar workers” now skew Republican, and a lot of working-class voters, having labored away all their lives, think about retirement as the opportunity to ‘relax’ and behave accordingly.
To some of them, maybe many (I know too many), physical activity looks a lot like work, so, in retirement, they avoid it as much as possible. Their idea of physical activity becomes golf – the version that involves driving/riding around in carts and drinking beer – or ‘cycling’ around on throttle-controlled ebikes that seldom require a turn of the pedals that Albert Einstein (yes, that Albert Einstein) famously spun regularly in his search for inspiration.
Or they sit and sit and sit to do whatever. There are a lot of retired folks sitting around in this country these days despite the pandemic having eliminated a large number of the elderly.
Nothing learned
The sedentary link to pandemic deaths – as opposed to uncomfortable but survivable SARS-CoV-2 infections – has gone largely unnoticed, although the survivors of Covid-19 infections vastly outnumber those killed by the virus that first appeared in China but quickly went global.
You’d think we’d want to know as much about why so many lived as why others died.
By June 2023, more than 96 percent of Americans – approximately 323 million people – were found to have SARS-CoV-2 antibodies indicating that they had at some point been infected with the virus. The number of deaths from Covid-19 during the pandemic was then estimated at between 1.1 million to 1.2 million, or about one in every 281 people.
Or, looked at another way, the numbers in general say you were 281 times more likely to survive Covid than die from it. But the odds shifted with fitness.
The unfit had a much greater chance of death than 1 in 281, and the fit had a much, much better chance of survival than one in 281. Plenty of fit people got sick, but not many of them died.
There are about 1,500 professional U.S., European and Asian cyclists registered with the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI). Nearly all of them, like the rest of us, were eventually infectwd with Covid. Some of them were hit by the SARS-CoV-2 at the very start of the pandemic, when the virus was at its deadliest.
The death rate for these cyclists was not one in 281. It was not one in 500. It was not even one in 1,000.
It was zero.
Why? Because millions of years of human evolution shaped an immune system that depends on physical activity to keep it strong. And evolution, like nature, doesn’t care about politics. But both care about fitness.
That humans are, at the end of the day, still governed by nature and subject to their long, evolutionary history, was the big lesson that should have been learned from the pandemic.
Unfortunately, a lot of Americans didn’t get it and need to be given the same advice White House physician Sean Barbabella, gave President Donald Trump after his annual physical last month: Increase your volume of physical activity and lose some weight.
Or, put simply, eat less but better and exercise more. Unfortunately, that sounds too much like work to many Americans. And it now seems impossible to put enough fear of the consequences of the sedentary lifestyle into them to get them up and moving.
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