How the delta surge changed the death divide between California's Republican and Democratic areas

Months into the delta surge, a COVID-19 death divide has opened up between California's Republican and Democratic strongholds, according to a Chronicle data analysis. Our analysis shows that counties that voted heavily for Trump have seen higher death rates than their bluer counterparts since vaccines became widely available in June - a shift from the period before, when Democratic-leaning counties had higher death rates. We also found a large vaccination gap between the most Trump-heavy counties and the Biden-heavy ones. COVID-19 Map: Data on trends in the Bay Area and across California Mask FAQ: What you need to know about the latest rules Latest news: Complete coverage of the coronavirus pandemic For our analysis, we divided counties into three groups: the 12 counties where 30% or less of the two-party vote share went to Trump, the 23 with a Trump share between 30 and 50%, and the 23 with a greater than 50% Trump share. While the first two groups have roughly equal populations - a little over 18.2 million people - the latter, most heavily-Trump group of counties is home to just over 3 million people, because those counties tend to be less populous than the state's heavily Democratic regions. We then compared death rates across these groups before and after June 21 - the day that 50% of California's population became fully vaccinated, according to data from the California Health and Human Services Agency. Before June 21, we found, the counties with the smallest share of Trump voters actually had a higher death rate than the counties with more Trump voters. The overall death rate for residents in these counties was 170 per 100,000 residents. For the in-between counties, the death rate was 156 per 100,000; for the most Trump-voting counties, the death rate was 124 per 100,000. Jennifer Kates, senior vice president and director of global health at Kaiser Family Foundation, said that these pre-vaccine discrepancies were likely rooted in demographic differences between Republican and Democratic counties. For instance, Democratic counties tend to have greater numbers of Black and Latino people, who have died disproportionately from COVID-19 throughout the pandemic. Other factors may have come into play on a county-by-county level; for instance, Los Angeles County, which has had the majority of COVID-19 deaths, has a lot of residents living in multigenerational households, which put elderly people living in those households at greater risk for contracting the disease. After vaccinations became widely available, however, the calculus changed. The death rate for counties with the highest Trump share since June 21 is 30% higher than for the counties with middling or lower Trump share. These numbers are much lower than the previous period largely because the second period covers fewer than three months of the pandemic, while the first covers over 15. But vaccinations have also driven down death rates in all counties to varying degrees, Kates said. "The vaccines made a big difference, and they probably made a big difference for Republicans and Democrats," she said. "But because vaccine uptake was higher (in Democratic counties), the likely impact we saw of the vaccine on death rates was greater." To underscore this point, we found that counties with the greatest Trump share are just 41% fully vaccinated, whereas counties with the smallest Trump share are over 63% fully vaccinated - a gap of over 20 percentage points. We also looked at the relationship between counties' income and their COVID-19 death rates. We found that unlike politics, the connection between wealth and death rates has stayed largely consistent: The richest counties, i.e. those with median household incomes over $75,000, have seen far less death than lower-income counties. In the period after June 21, the wealthiest counties' death rate was less than half that of the lowest-income counties. Susie Neilson is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: susie.neilson@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @susieneilson

How the delta surge changed the death divide between California's Republican and Democratic areas

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