America's myriad afflictions
In this week's newsletter, we take a journey across various challenges facing the United States, some of them self-inflicted and some of them extra-self-inflicted. And then, at the very end, there's a funny chart about sports. So sort of an emotional wash!
Chapter 1
Where the measles is most likely to take root
Americans love nostalgia. We like to think about how things were, remembering the old days with a glass of wine and a twinge of melancholy. This is probably 95 percent a function of "the old days" tending to correlate with "a point when one had few responsibilities or bills and lots of free time," but it manifests as "weren't bell-bottoms kind of cool?"
Not every past trend needs to be revived, however. Like, say, deadly diseases. And yet here we are, making America splotchy again.
This week, ABC News published an interactive map showing where the risk of measles outbreaks was highest — meaning the places where vaccination against the virus was lowest. Compiled by researchers from Boston Children's Hospital, Harvard School of Medicine and Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai, the data is a useful compilation of where you might not want to take a breathing-in-people's-faces vacation. (Now there's something to be nostalgic about!)
Being me, I was excited to have a tidy vaccination dataset to play with. So I figured I'd test a few of my untested assumptions about why some places had lower vaccination rates than others.
For example, I was curious whether these numbers mirrored the decline in support for vaccination that accelerated among Republicans (and Republican presidential administrations) after covid-19 emerged. I was also curious how rates correlated to income.
So I grouped the U.S.'s 3,000-plus counties into buckets by income and 2024 vote margins and averaged out the vaccination rates. What I found was that lowest rates were in lower income, more Democratic counties — not what I'd expected.
How to read this chart: This is essentially a heat map, showing values for 100 clusters of counties. At top left, the counties that are among the 10% with both the lowest median incomes and the biggest margins for Kamala Harris in 2024. At bottom right, the counties that are among the 10% with both the highest median incomes and biggest margins for Donald Trump. The more red, the lower the average vaccination rate.
If you are curious (as I was), looking at average vs. median income didn't make a significant difference.