Politics: New study study quantifies higher rate of COVID -19 cases in states led by Republican governors.

Strict COVID-19 policies in Democratic-led states worked, new research found. Republican-led states saw more illness. States with strict COVID-19 rules saw 8% fewer infections than models would predict, a study found. Those states tended to have Democratic governors. Erin Schumaker YahooNews

A study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine on Monday found that COVID-19 rules in states with Democratic governors were, on average, linked to 8% fewer daily COVID-19 cases in 2020 than a mathematical model would have predicted otherwise.

Republican-led states, by contrast, had 8% more cases than the model would have expected.

To assess the strength and effectiveness of various states' COVID-19 policies, the researchers behind the study created a system they called the "Public Health Protective Policy Index." The index factored in daily COVID-19 case counts in 2020, a range of policies enacted at the state level, and governors' political affiliations, then assigned quantitative values to these many factors. Then the team compared the resulting scores.

Those results showed that the public-health measures Democratic governors put in place last year were, on average, 10 percentage points more stringent than those put in place by Republican governors. And that had an observable effect on how many people got sick.

"Eight percent is not huge, but it's there. If you're wondering if policies actually matter, apparently they do," Olga Shvetsova, a political-science professor at Binghamton University who led the study, told Insider. ...

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