Democrats and Republicans Differ on #covid19 Response For a Good Reason

Democrats and Republicans have widely diverging opinions on how to approach #covid19 and this has to do with where they live.

Yale historian Frank Snowden says notes that “coronavirus is emphatically a disease of globalization and is causing it to unravel to a certain degree.” The virus is striking hardest in cities that are “densely populated and linked by rapid air travel, by movements of tourists, of refugees, all kinds of businesspeople, all kinds of interlocking networks.”

This fact has shaped the political response in the U.S., as the Democratic Party, centered in globalized cities, demands an intensive response. Liberal professionals may also be more likely to be able to work while isolated at home. Republican voters are less likely to live in dense areas with high numbers of infections and so far appear less receptive to dramatic countermeasures.

Infectious disease can change the physical landscape itself. Mr. Snowden notes that when Napoleon III rebuilt Paris in the mid-19th century, one of his objectives was to protect against cholera: “It was this idea of making broad boulevards, where the sun and light could disperse the miasma.” Cholera also prompted expansions of regulatory power over the “construction of houses, how they had to be built, the cleanliness standards.” If respiratory viruses become a more persistent feature of life in the West, changes to public transportation and zoning could also be implemented based on our understanding of science—which, like Napoleon’s, is sure to be built upon or superseded in later years.

From the Wall Street Journal: https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-epidemics-change-civilizations-11585350405