Trump’s “Red State” Coronavirus Crisis

Conspiracy theorists argue that COVID-19 has been no more damaging in most states than a bad outbreak of influenza. “Co-morbidity” or doctors mislabeling fatalities from other conditions in the elderly, they claim, has been falsely assigned as “death by coronavirus.” These skeptics ignore the basic fact that since March of 2020, the raw number of excess fatalities in the United States has amounted to 200,000 more deaths than a normal year – roughly the same mortality rate that the CDC assigns to COVID-19.

Even Donald Trump cannot dismiss a death rate higher than that the collective American casualties of World War I, Korea, and Vietnam. Instead, to escape responsibility, the president has chosen to blame the gubernatorial administration of Democratically-controlled states for the U.S.’ mounting COVID-19 fatalities. “If you take the blue states out, we’re at a level that I don’t think anybody in the world would be at,” he said during a briefing last Wednesday. “We’re really at a very low level. But some of the states, they were blue states and blue state-managed.”

In fact, the number of coronavirus fatalities in just red states alone would still put the U.S. second in the global COVID-19 death rankings, behind Brazil. Put another way, that would translate to the U.S. possessing 11 percent of global coronavirus deaths compared with its four percent of the world’s population, and that unnecessarily high mortality rate came partially due to Republican governors tending to reopen their states too early, while Democrats heeded the danger of infection over economic pain of remaining closed.

In general, the South claimed 57,000 total excess deaths over last year. More importantly, the rate of the fatalities increased from an extra 2,000 each week in March to a boost of 6,000 weekly by June over the same period in 2019. Republican states in the West saw a similar boost with 29,000 total excess deaths, and the weekly excess deaths numbers tripling in those four months.

In fact, Louisiana has endured one of the worst fatality rates from COVID-19, 1.7 times normal levels. Unlike other states in this region, Democrat John Bel Edwards kept the Pelican State quarantined comparatively longer in Phases 1 and 2 than our neighbors, meaning that our excess death rate peaked in April. Medical experts said Mardi Gras gatherings most likely contributed to the early spike, but our “blue state” policies got the pandemic under slight control sooner.

The same cannot be said of the president’s loyalist base, the other states of the former Confederacy with GOP Governors. Out of every egregious lie comes a modicum of truth. Unlike Louisiana, Trump is correct that, at first, most of the “red” southern states were doing better then the “blue” northern states. The problem is that Dixie’s Republican Chief Executives tended to heed the president’s advice, re-opening too soon, and the fatality rates skyrocketed by summer.

Those nine of the thirteen states in the South started seeing excess deaths surge in July, months into the pandemic. A spike in cases in places like Texas put pressure on hospitals, echoing the chaos that ensued in New York months earlier. South Carolina, among the first states to reopen retail stores, saw deaths reach 1.6 times normal levels in mid-July. And the larger African-American and Hispanic populations in the South paid the price, not just in gross deaths outstripping than the Caucasian majority, but in resulting higher co-morbidities than previous years.

The coronavirus pandemic seems to be leading to a long-term uptick in cancer incidence and deaths, further highlighting the racial, ethnic and socioeconomic disparities already seen with the disease. COVID-19 could completely reverse the trend of lower cancer deaths, especially the recent success in narrowing the gap between different race and ethnicities in both incidence and death rates. The American Association for Cancer Research last Wednesday released its first annual cancer disparities progress report, which also looks at the similarities between COVID-19 and cancer disparities.

They found, “The burden of COVID-19 falls disproportionately on racial and ethnic minority groups. For example, Hispanics, who are about 18 percent of the U.S. population, account for 34 percent of COVID-19 cases. [Moreover], Social determinants of health — such as where a person lives, works, and obtains food and the ability to get health care access — and underlying health conditions affect a person’s risk factor. For example, the rate of hospitalization for COVID-19 is three times higher for urban Medicare recipients than rural recipients.” Particularly frightening was the role that biological or genetic factors could play in the severity of complications in COVID-19 patients, especially as these researchers note that a higher risk exists in African Americans with asthma who have higher levels of two proteins (ACE2 and TMPRSS2) needed for SARS-CoV-2 infection of cells.

The report also found various barriers to timely COVID-19 testing in underserved communities. National Cancer Institute Director Ned Sharpless told scientists at a July roundtable that just looking at two cancers (breast and colorectal), there will likely be 10,000 additional deaths over the next decade due to the drop in screening and treatments during the pandemic, something for which Donald Trump said his administration “had a plan.” Sharpless noted, “One thing we’re very worried about in particular is the impact of hospital closures and reduced clinical capacity on patients with cancer — the reductions in screenings, the reductions in patient care.”

John Carpten, chair of the report’s steering committee and of the AACR Minorities in Cancer Research Council, agrees. “If you had to put off your diagnosis by even six months, that cancer could grow and progress and maybe even metastasize in that timeframe.” By the way, those screenings declined in the Red States at a far greater rate than the Blue States.

This article originally published in the September 21, 2020 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.