In this (hopefully permanent) lull to the pandemic, the public has an opportunity to look back and reflect on the massive toll COVID-19 took on us. In terms of loss, the death toll in the United States is more than 970,000 at the time of this writing; meanwhile, the political rift widened by the pandemic is visible in other slightly more subtle ways — especially by differences in vaccination rates and, accordingly, death tolls.
Indeed, the numbers continue to reveal that Americans in red states who refuse to follow public health measures are suffering from COVID-19 in far excess of their blue state counterparts. Back in 2021, President Joe Biden was already referring to the pandemic as a "pandemic of the unvaccinated"; the data backed him up at the time, and remains true now, as the pandemic is perhaps poised to enter an endemic phase.
