United States’ political climates and the spread of SARS-2-COVID-19 during 2020
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Abstract
We tested whether the political climate in each U.S. state and Washington, DC determined the nature of the spread of COVID-19 cases and deaths in those polities during 2020. Political climate for each polity was indexed as a weighted average of the proportion of Republicans in legislatures in 2018 and the degree of public trust in both the White House and President Trump to handle COVID-19 in April, 2020. We found that polities higher on the political climate index had faster increases in per capita COVID-19 cases and deaths. Such Republican-trusting polities also had lower access to health care and less public engagement in prevention behavior, both of which mediated the influence of political climate on COVID- 19 cases and deaths. Further, the relationship between incidence of COVID-19 cases and deaths was weaker in more Republican-trusting polities. Political climate can be seen as contributing to more cases and deaths due to lower access to health care and to lower public adherence to public health guidelines in polities led by Republicans and which trusted the Trump White House to handle the pandemic.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2022.05.16.22275162: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Caveats: The present study could not be experimental, and so it lacks the possibility of strong causal inference. Observational studies leave open the possibility of unexamined causal variables. Our study did, however, use reliable data sources encompassing all the states and DC for 300 days, omitting only US territories because predictor data for them were not available. The causality of political climate as a significant factor in COVID-19 …
SciScore for 10.1101/2022.05.16.22275162: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Caveats: The present study could not be experimental, and so it lacks the possibility of strong causal inference. Observational studies leave open the possibility of unexamined causal variables. Our study did, however, use reliable data sources encompassing all the states and DC for 300 days, omitting only US territories because predictor data for them were not available. The causality of political climate as a significant factor in COVID-19 spread is plausible for several reasons. First, it is parsimonious, theoretically-grounded, and consistent with a number of studies that used smaller polities (e.g., counties), or were shorter-term, or smaller-scale [32, 42, 45]. Second, the present study found evidence for two plausible mediators of the influence of Republican-trusting political climate on COVID-19 cases and deaths: limited access to health care (assessed in multiple ways) and low public cooperation with COVID-19 prevention behaviors. Although the polity unit of analysis used was somewhat appropriate because state governors often did set COVID-19 policies, it is also somewhat crude both for assessing climate and policies. Stronger results might have obtained with a finer-grained unit of locale for assessing political climate, but the consistency of the present results with studies using a variety of other methods, from anonymous cell phone searches [33, 34] to opinion polls [26, 48] to medical records [42, 45], lends credibility to the findings. The reliably weaker relat...
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.
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