this is not really about walking without mask, but seemingly more about Republicans not believing in vaccines,
Jacob Wallace, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham & Jason L. Schwartz Excess Death Rates for Republicans and Democrats During the COVID-19 Pandemic, NBER September 2022
Registered Republicans in Florida and Ohio had higher excess death rates than registered Democrats, driven by a large mortality gap in the period after all adults were eligible for vaccines
We estimate substantially higher excess death rates for registered Republicans when compared to registered Democrats, with almost all of the difference concentrated in the period after vaccines were widely available in our study states. Overall, the excess death rate for Republicans was 5.4 percentage points (pp), or 76%, higher than the excess death rate for Democrats. Post- vaccines, the excess death rate gap between Republicans and Democrats widened from 1.6 pp (22% of the Democrat excess death rate) to 10.4 pp (153% of the Democrat excess death rate). The gap in excess death rates between Republicans and Democrats is concentrated in counties with low vaccination rates and only materializes after vaccines became widely available.
To calculate excess deaths, we use 577,659 deaths of individuals linked to their 2017 voting records in Ohio and Florida who died at age 25 or older between January 2018 and December 2021.
These expected deaths are calculated non-parametrically using 2019 data by aggregating deaths into counts Nmcpa,2019 at the month-by-county-by-party-by-age-bin level. The age bins used were 25-64, 65-74, 75-84, and 85-and-older
in the Covid Pre-Vaccine period, the association between excess death rates and county-level vaccination rates are nearly identical for Democrats and Republicans.
in the Covid Post-Vaccine period, there is a clear .. difference between Democrats and Republicans with higher excess death rates for Republicans in counties with lower vaccination rates. By comparison, the difference in excess deaths between Republicans and Democrats is nearly zero in counties with the highest vaccination rates.