Writing for the New York Times on Monday, David Leohard said, “COVID’s partisan pattern is growing more extreme.

During the early months of COVID-19 vaccinations, several major demographic groups lagged in receiving shots, including Black Americans, Latino Americans and Republican voters.

More recently, the racial gaps — while still existing — have narrowed. The partisan gap, however, continues to be enormous. A Pew Research Center poll in August found that 86 percent of Democratic voters had received at least one shot, compared with 60 percent of Republican voters.

The political divide over vaccinations is so large that almost every reliably blue state now has a higher vaccination rate than almost every reliably red state:

COVID deaths are also showing a partisan pattern. COVID is still a national crisis, but the worst forms of it are increasingly concentrated in red America.

It’s worth remembering that COVID followed a different pattern for more than a year after its arrival in the U.S. Despite widespread differences in mask wearing — and scientific research suggesting that masks reduce the virus’s spread — the pandemic was, if anything, worse in blue regions.

Masks evidently were not powerful enough to overcome other regional differences, like the amount of international travel that flows through major metro areas, which tend to be politically liberal.

Vaccination has changed the situation. The vaccines are powerful enough to overwhelm other differences between blue and red areas.

Some left-leaning communities — like many suburbs of New York, San Francisco and Washington, as well as much of New England — have such high vaccination rates that even the unvaccinated are partly protected by the low number of cases. Conservative communities, on the other hand, have been walloped by the highly contagious Delta variant.

On Tuesday a Brodstone Memorial Hospital spokesman said the number of cases continue to increase in this area with 26 active COVID-19 cases currently i n Nuckolls County, Only 51 percent of the Nuckolls County residents have been vaccinated. Statewide the 61 percent of the Nebraskans are vaccinated. COVID-19 patients currently hospitalized at Brodstone are younger and sicker than those treated in the previous COVID-19 wave.

Since Delta began circulating widely in the U.S., Covid has exacted a horrific death toll on red America: In counties where Donald Trump received at least 70 percent of the vote, the virus has killed about 47 out of every 100,000 people since the end of June, according to Charles Gaba, a health care analyst. In counties where Trump won less than 32 percent of the vote, the number is about 10 out of 100,000.

And the gap will probably keep growing:

Why is this happening?

Some of the vaccination gap stems from the libertarian instincts of many Republicans. “They understand freedom as being left alone to make their own choices, and they resent being told what to do,” William Galston wrote in The Wall Street Journal.

But philosophy is only a partial explanation. In much of the rest of the world, vaccine attitudes do not break down along right-left lines, and some conservative leaders have responded effectively to COVID. So have a few Republican governors in the U.S. “It didn’t have to be this way,”

If the Republicans continue to value their liberty above their life, refuse to be vaccinated and die at a higher rate than the liberal Democrats, their chances of regaining control of the White House and the Federal government will be diminished.

It is a rather bizarre argument but it has been suggested that the partisan gap in vaccination rates was part of a liberal plot. Perhaps liberals like Biden and Nancy Pelosi have tried so hard to persuade people to get vaccinated, because they know Republican voters will do the opposite of whatever they say.

In a country where elections are decided on razor-thin margins, does it not benefit one side if their opponents simply drop dead?”