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The Politics of Coronavirus Testing
By Kent R. Kroeger (April 2, 2020)
According to recent a Pew Research Poll, 59 percent of Democrats (and those Democrat-leaning) said the coronavirus outbreak is a major national threat, but only one-third of Republicans (and those Republican-leaning) had the same view.
Partisans in the U.S can’t even leave politics out of a worldwide pandemic. Perhaps German writer Thomas Mann was right when he told a German audience in 1930 that “politics is everything.”
Still, we can’t all agree the coronavirus pandemic is a national crisis?
Nope, apparently not.
And our hyper-partisan political culture is a having a tangible impact on coronavirus suppression and mitigation strategies at the state-level.
For example, 37 governors have issued statewide stay-at-home orders, according to CNN. Notable, however, are those states that not issued such a statewide order: Alabama, Arkansas, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah and Wyoming.
Every one of the stay-at-home laggard states was won by Donald Trump in the 2016 election. Furthermore, among governors in Trump-states that have implemented stay-at-home orders, many have Democratic governors: Kansas, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and…
