It's been claimed in the media that
Back in September, health care analyst Charles Gaba also told the New York Times that counties where Trump received at least 70% of the vote in the 2020 presidential election, COVID-19 had killed about 47 out of every 100,000 people since the end of June. But in counties where Trump won less than 32% of the vote, the number was a fraction of that — about 10 out of 100,000.
A more detailed version of the claim appears on his website:
That ratio seems to refer to the higher vs lowest 10th population "bracket"; the latter voted <26% (not <32%) for Trump, so he was probably slightly misquoted or miscommunicated that to the press. (The highest bracket voted >70.6% for Trump, so that fits. The brackets here are taken by equal division of the population rather than vote share deciles, so the division is somewhat confusing/unusual.) The Covid-19 death rates (per 100K pop.) in these two extreme brackets were 7.29 vs 34.89, which gives a 4.786 multiplier.
At the end of that page there's update in which he (further) claims that
the [death] ratio between the highest and lowest bracket has increased further yet, from 4.79x higher to 5.46x higher in just 8 days.
Based on some discussion in the comments below, it might be the case that what was reported to the wider press was actually this 2nd graph, which has a 46.74 ~ 47 death rate for the last bracket while the 2nd (rather than the 1st) bracket ends at 31.6% ~ 32% vote share for Trump. The death rate average of these first two brackets is (12.19 + 8.55) / 2 = 10.37 ~ 10 from the first press report. This while the graph itself highlights the 5.46 ratio of death rates in last to of 1st bracket.
Is what Charles Gaba claims true, were Covid-19 (per capita) death rates at approx. 5 times greater in the >70%-vote-for-Trump counties vs the 26%-32% vote-for-Trump counties, between end of June and mid-Sep 2021?
Also worth nothing perhaps that an earlier (peer-reviewed) analysis by Gao and Radford covering the time period of April 6 to May 25 of 2021 found that:
controlling for several potential confounders, counties with higher levels of Trump support do not necessarily experience greater mortality rates due to COVID-19.
So what Gaba claims is a pretty substantial change in that regard.
This G&R paper is actually a bit confusing [to me] as they include stuff like stay-at-home policy/orders and restaurant closures as independent variables/confounders, basically assuming that whether these orders are issued is unrelated to the political orientation of the county inhabitants. Apparently G&R considered only whether compliance with such orders is a function of political orientation of the inhabitants.
There is also a much simpler paper/model on 2020 by Neelon & al. but at US state rather than county level. It found a reversal of Covid-19 death odds from Democrat-led to Republican-led states in July of that year, i.e. after July the odds were greater in states with a Republican governor. That analysis stops in mid Dec 2020 though. In relation to that simpler model, Gaba's claim is less surprising, but the [death] odds ratio determined in that paper is fairly small i.e. 1.18 (95% CI: 1.02-1.31) for July-Dec 2020. Gaba seems to claim a much more sizeable effect (later on). For the sake of trying to come up with a similar two-bracket measure from Gaba's last graph, if I average the last 5 and the first 5 bins, the death [odds] ratio for these is 32.92 : 15.45 = 2.12. If using instead the last 4 vs first 6 bins (which puts the voting cutoff at 49.1% -- the closest to 50% in that bracket data) the result is a fairly similar 35.005 : 17.065 = 2.05 ratio. These ~2 ratios are less shocking than the ~5 ratio of the extreme brackets, but still quite a bit higher than the 1.18 from Neelon's paper.
