Now how do you explain that? The French people in Switzerland had the same results as the French people in France and the German people in Switzerland had the same experience as the German people in Germany. But in Switzerland itself, in the same country with the same leadership, wildly different results. And same with the Belgian group. So they matched each of those three ethnicities matched very well to what the country that they are associated with, different country, how they did. How do you explain that? Well one hypothesis is that it's a cultural difference. It could be that Germans don't touch as much. It could be that they don't have the same closeness, handshaking, just cheek kissing. I don't know. Maybe something like that. So that's one possibility and that was what was suggested by Yasha's tweet.

But of course Andres Backhaus came into the comments and ruined all my happiness because I thought at last I understand what's going on. There's a very big difference in terms of cultural behavior that might be important. And Andres points out that there's also another big variable that cannot be overlooked which is commuting. So in other words the French-speaking part probably commutes to other French places. The German-speaking part probably commutes to work to other German-speaking places. I assume some of this is over the border. And that it really might have to do with where the infection gets a hold first and then where do they travel. In other words do the French-speaking people in Switzerland spend as much time traveling to the German and Belgian parts of Switzerland or do they stick within their own French-speaking part? Probably a lot of sticking within your own neighborhood. So it could be that travel and transportation patterns end up explaining the whole thing. That if you have a certain kind of transportation pattern you are relatively safe. Let's say New Zealand. What is the international travel pattern or even the domestic travel pattern within New Zealand? And if you saw that visually compared to say the United States would they look similar? Just one is bigger. Is that the only difference? I don't think so. I think our travel patterns in the United States might have a lot to do with our experience if not the culture.

All right, so that's still an open question. But the fact that Switzerland had such different experiences with one leadership, does that not tell you that leadership is not the overarching variable? Because Switzerland should have had a fairly uniform experience if the only thing that matters is how well you manage the outbreak. But in fact they were so different that you could almost rule out leadership as even being a variable. Because if it were you'd get more similar results. And when you got something that was an outsized effect like an outbreak it would be like New York City where you could look at and say well it's New York City. We had more travel. There was a problem with the old folks who were put in nursing homes, etc. So you would identify it. If it was an exception you could track it down pretty easily.

All right, more and more people talking about the similarities between the polling this year and the polling in 2016. And if you look at the swing states especially and you look at the differences you can see that the amount that Hillary was leading Trump in 2016 only to lose those sa