No! More Math? Yes, But It's Simple Addition - Rogue Thinking #3

 

If you recall from Rogue Thinking #2, there is presently an enormous difference between COVID infections, hospitalizations, and deaths between vaccinated versus unvaccinated individuals. The difference does not favor the unvaccinated. But besides being a generally expectable outcome, there is more to be learned from this difference.

For one thing, the idea of ‘herd-immunity’ is shown to be more complicated than the simple notion of how a disease spread through a population until that population is either rendered self-protected, decimated, or extinct. COVID isn’t virulent enough to pose an extinction outcome as no totally lethal variant has emerged though that is always a risk. But even should one emerge, it would be highly unlikely to annihilate humanity but rather the current level of modern civilization. In essence, herd-immunity would be achieved by reducing our large civilization herds to small isolated pocket herds.

The COVID variants present today are following the more classic notion of how a disease spread through a population and reduces the herds numbers by some percentage. The way the disease spreads and the ease with which it is transmitted determines how quickly it reaches its herd-immunity state. The current phenomenon where COVID is producing the high differential outcomes between the vaccinated and unvaccinated might seem to be both obvious and puzzling at the same time.

On the obvious side is the basic expectation that vaccinated people either do not get ill when exposed due to their acquired immunity or their illness exhibits much lower severity of symptoms if any at all. Whereas the unvaccinated will results in outcomes expected from infections without any pre-infection acquired immunity. If you have a population evenly divided between vaccinated and unvaccinated that difference become apparent immediately. If you start with a totally unvaccinated population, you get the pandemic results that we saw with COVID. Once vaccines arrived, this created a new grouping within the population and the differentiated results begam emerging. From this ‘obvious’ perspective there is nothing unusual going on here. Except, there is more going on.

In your typical ‘herd’ there is just that transmission process operating according to laws of physics, biological activities, and laws of probability. The disease spreads, produces its ‘natural selection’ outcomes, and eventually creates the ‘herd-immunity’ end-state (of whatever type the particular disease creates). But that is not strictly true for COVID, or more precisely, the processes which are controlling the spread and results for the human herd.

In the US, COVID outcomes have diverged in concert with vaccinated versus unvaccinated as noted above. However, what are the “cause and effect” relationships which account for why someone is vaccinated or unvaccinated? If some people could not get access to vaccinations, then the question would be: “Why not?” But the evidence indicates the vast majority of unvaccinated people have self-selected to not be vaccinated. Is that self-selection just a random decision even distributed through the population? No. The data/evidence tells us that one of the most prevalent factors associated with this self-selection is political alignment. Given that the COVID virus is non-partisan, the connection of spread and outcomes to politics warrants some consideration regarding why.

It could just be that if you are unvaccinated that’s it. If vaccines are 95% effective, then viola! That would say that 1 out of 20 vaccinated people are not adequately protected, while all of the unvaccinated remain exposed. But that is just part of the obvious understanding of the situation and the simple math. Why are the bulk of the unvaccinated aligned with a conservative political party? This doesn’t mean that no conservatives are vaccinated or that no liberals are unvaccinated. It just means that there is numeric imbalance between those two orientations.  To explain the different outcomes, Occam’s razor would conclude that that is the simplest explanation. Your political alignment influences your self-selection choice, and that choice produces the predictable outcome based upon your party.

But there is much more that can be learned and that can be contributing to the excessive hospitalizations and deaths among conservative members of the population. For the simple math to explain it all, the disease must be spreading equally throughout the population which requires physical conditions to be the case. For example, the population of conservatives and liberals would uniformly distributed, the prevalence of the virus has to be uniformly present throughout the population, or method(s) of transmission has to be uniformly operating across the population. None of these conditions are or have been true. Consider how population density can be influential in where and how the virus spreads. Early in the disease it was most prevalent in high population density areas. What might influence key elements of transmission within the conservative population?

There are some very likely candidates. While no one candidate needs to be the ‘one’ that is causal, the aggregate affect may account for a significant part of the process producing the disparate results. Consider some of the following population attributes and factors:

·         Parents’ political party/alignment

·         Place of birth or where you were raised

·         Religious affiliation

·         Political orientation of friends, co-workers, neighborhood, community

·         Education: level, quality, region (urban, suburban, rural), economic status, major, …

·         Career / Employment

·         Economic status

·         Other factors which have some influence over your political alignment

Why do these attributes and factors matter in what political party you choose to align yourself with? Well, because each of them is part of the environment in which you grew into who you are. You learned from all the things that made up your environment and that presented you with the ‘facts’ and ‘knowledge’ about the world. If selecting your own political/ideological view were just something that you did and was not connected to these factors, math would say the data we see would be highly improbable. Children are much more likely to be/choose the same party as their parents. Your friends, neighbors, and community are more likely to be of your political alignment. If your religion is aligned to a political party, you are also likely to be. Much of this is due to your exposure to the ideas, values, rules, and behaviors that you experience as you grow from childhood to adulthood. To be a member of a family, a group, a community, or a region and be accepted by the other members puts a heavy burden on following the precepts of those entities. This doesn’t mean that there are no individual differences or rogue members but that there is a tendency toward a common perspective (a convergence toward the average). Being different is acceptable, as long as it is not too different and doesn’t violate an absolute behavior/belief of the ‘group’.

Conservatives (and liberals) are commonly found to live in communities/regions which are mostly concentrations of conservatives (or liberals). To paraphrase the “You are what you eat” concept, “You are where you grew up”. It is very human to be ‘tribal’.

What does all this have to do with COVID and the 20 to 1 disparity between the unvaccinated and the vaccinated? Well, if your ‘tribe’ decides that being vaccinated goes against the tribal values and is a betrayal of your commitment to the tribe; well, then your desire to be a member of the tribe is going to influence your decision. Conforming to the tribe’s position may even provide a strengthening of the bonds and beliefs in the tribe. It’s just human nature.

If conservatives live in communities that are composed of mostly or more conservatives, if conservatives interact with and engage more often with others who are conservative, if conservatives are more likely to choose to be unvaccinated because not getting vaccinated is perceived as following a conservative value then the spread of the virus among conservatives is increased. The consequences of those infections being more severe for unvaccinated individuals will contribute to the known outcomes. The 20 to 1 disparity in hospitalizations and deaths makes perfect mathematical sense. The process of herd-immunity operates locally through the transmission of the virus from person to person. The concentration of unvaccinated individuals due to factors like political alignment just plays into this process. It’s just simple math. It’s the math of epidemics/pandemics. It’s the math of herd-immunity. It’s the math of Darwinian evolution.

It has now also become the math of politics.