The average Republican is 50 and the average Democrat is 47. I don’t think there will be a huge difference in coronavirus impact.
Source: https://www.debt.org/faqs/americans-in-debt/economic-demogra...
Source: https://www.debt.org/faqs/americans-in-debt/economic-demogra...
The first thing that I would draw your attention to is that social shifts have moved the "silent generation" from being evenly split Democrat/Republican in 2004 to going for Trump by a 13 point margin in 2016. This is the group that will suffer the vast majority of fatalities. See https://www.people-press.org/2016/09/13/2-party-affiliation-... for verification.
Secondly, women lean Democratic, men Republican. (The same link verifies that.) Most casualties will be men. See https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se... for verification.
Third, the upcoming generations through that 12 years are overwhelmingly Democratic and will have almost no deaths from this disease. Both previous links verify that.
The result is that, a well researched article from a dozen years ago notwithstanding, the impact of COVID-19 are likely to disproportionately hit Republicans over Democrats.
(Not necessarily. The one trend that Republicans can hope for is that diseases spread through urban areas and urban areas are overwhelmingly Democratic. I don't think that this offsets the other phenomena though.)
- old people vote in far larger proportion compared to young folks
- they tend to vote conservative
- this virus is likely to kill old people disproportionately
- red states tend to do less well in terms of all kinds of infrastructure, including medical
...then would you expect to see a change in the results of future elections?