A debt of gratitude

In the median of a commercial road not far from my house there's a sign that says something like:

"States with Democratic Governors 127,000 deaths,
States with Republican Governors 80,000 deaths"

As if to call out the superiority of the Republican governors' strategies in controlling the spread of the virus. This is sheerest nonsense. The high ratio of cases to deaths in Republican states now (expressed otherwise, the disease's comparably low lethality) is to a considerable extent a function of the spread being slowed enough for the medical and elder care worlds to have figured out how to manage the disease, which happened in the Northeast, where there were basically a whole lot of involuntary human sacrifices. The whole nation in fact owes the Northeast a tremendous debt of gratitude for acting as the first line of defense against the virus.

The course of the virus maps important social and economic fault lines: it's not just lower-wealth and populations of color that got pummeled, it's the ones that live in the places of highest commercial intensity and population density, the Northeast Corridor that stretches from Washington, DC to Boston, but most intensively in the New York City metro area, that great beast of commerce and culture. In effect, not only do the blue states of the Northeast (and blue counties nationwide) significantly underwrite the operating costs of red states and counties by paying much more in taxes than they receive in inbound Federal transfers, they have also paid a high cost in the blood of their citizens. In both New Jersey and New York, more than 1 person in 600 has died from the coronavirus in the last eight months. Ponder that.

Trump could have framed it that way. If he had a leadership bone in his body, he could have said thank you and rallied round his native Northeast in its pain. He did not. For the sake of political expediency and a deluded love of Americans' innate freedom to do things that put themselves and their loved ones in danger, he picked wars with the mostly Democratic leadership of the Northeast states. We are all paying the price each day, but not like they did.