Republicans and Dems see COVID-19 differently. Is that making people sick?

As it turns out, it’s hard to prove that Republicans’ resistance to mask mandates or social distancing is actually worsening the pandemic. One reason is that political scientists and economists don’t feel equipped to take on the epidemiological modeling that would be necessary to measure what, say, a partisan divide on hand-washing actually means for the spread of the disease. Yael Hochberg, an economist at Rice University, said that the lack of uniformity in testing data made her reluctant to wade into the public health data. “There are places where testing still isn’t widely available,” Hochberg said. “And if testing isn’t uniform, it’s hard to compare what you’re seeing in one county versus another.”

One study tried to pin down the effect of differing levels of compliance with social distancing policies among Republicans and Democrats using individual geolocation data. It concluded that a Trump voter who contracts COVID-19 infects 16 percent more people than a comparable Clinton voter. That’s a striking finding — but it’s also only one study, and several infectious disease experts who reviewed the paper at my request were a little skeptical of its conclusions.

Samuel Scarpino, a professor at Northeastern University who studies infectious diseases, said that it can be very difficult, even in a sophisticated model, to separate all of the confounding factors that could be at play, like geography. And Katz said that without information about whether people are wearing masks or engaging in social distancing, it’s hard to draw very solid conclusions about transmission from mobility data.

Scarpino was quick to add, though, that polarization can still be a serious problem, even if it’s hard to quantify its precise impact.