Posted on 11/01/2020 4:56:59 AM PST by John W
President Trump has described his campaign rallies as “fun,” “wonderful,” “the Greatest Show on Earth,” and, of course, “BIG.”
An effort to calculate whether those events have increased the spread of the coronavirus in the United States suggests that “contagious” and “deadly” would also apply.
A rigorous attempt to gauge the after-effects of 18 of the president’s reelection rallies, all held in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, suggests they have led to more than 30,000 additional cases and at least 700 additional deaths.
Those casualties would not have occurred if the campaign events had not taken place, according to a team of Stanford researchers. Media coverage of the rallies made clear there was little effort to follow guidelines about social distancing, and mask use was optional for attendees, who typically numbered in the thousands. (Indeed, face coverings were disparaged by the president on several occasions.)
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
“Pre-released” before peer review. Gee, wonder why? Of the deaths, most of them were NOT rally attendees....study is bogus, pure BS meant to grab news cycle w/ headline only.
Garbage in, garbage out...
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3722299
The Effects of Large Group Meetings on the Spread of COVID-19: The Case of Trump Rallies
EXCERPT
2 Data
2.1 Trump rallies
We focus on rallies held between June 20th and September 22nd. While the Trump campaign held many rallies after September 22nd, we do not include them in our analysis for two reasons. First, because the effects of an event may grow substantially over time as incremental infections spread, we required at least four weeks of post-event data (excluding the week of the rally). Second, there are some indications that compliance with public health guidelines, such as the use of masks, improved at later rallies. While it would be worth evaluating the diminution of treatment effects resulting from greater compliance, we currently lack sufficient compliance data to conduct that investigation.
We obtain a list of general election Tump rallies via a regularly-updated Wikipedia list based on local and national news reports. We verify the date and county of the rally from local news reports. We manually record from news reports whether the rally was indoors.
Table 1 lists the rallies we include in our analysis, their dates, and whether they were indoor or outdoor.
2.2 Data on COVID 19
Our data on the incidence of COVID-19 comes from the COVID-19 Data Repository maintained
by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University (Dong
et al., 2020). The CSSE collects case and death reports from the CDC and U.S. state and local
governments. The CSSE time series data includes total confirmed cases and deaths from COVID-
19 associated with each Federal Information Processing Standards county code beginning January
22nd, 2020. The frequency of the data is daily, but we use it to construct weekly data series to
reduce noise. We obtain measures of new cases and deaths for each week by differencing these
series. In a small number of cases, the resulting measure of new cases or deaths is negative; we
treat those increments as zero. The CSSE also provides the latitude and longitude for each county,
2
2Through exploratory analysis, we found no elevation of COVID-19 cases in neighboring counties. However, to reduce the threat of measurement error from spillovers, we drop all counties within 50 kilometers of an event county.
4
(snip)
2.3 Other data
In addition to data on rallies and the spread of COVID-19, we use data on testing, COVID- related policies, and county-level demographic and election data, which we obtain from a variety of sources. State-level testing data is provided by the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic, which collects information from state departments of public health. We obtain county-level testing data for Wisconsin from the state departments of public health. We also use HealthData.gov’s dataset of COVID-19 State and County Policy Orders to obtain county-level policies, such as shelter-in-place orders and mask mandates. Finally, we extract several county-level demographics such as racial and socio-economic compositions from The Census Bureau’s Annual County Resident Population Estimates and 2016 election results from the MIT Election Data and Science Lab’s 2018 Election Analysis Dataset.
I heard it was 7,000,000 deaths//
Today it is estimated by them to surpass 7,000,000,000
( The whole world has died of covid cuz of bad orange man. )
And Cuomo’s and de Blasio’s slow movements and irresponsible suggestions killed thousands. Mathew 7:3-4. Where’s the outrage...or even the recognition?
rwood
Typical LA Times buklsgeit. Nothing about Biden hiding in his basement or his senility or his selection of an ineligible veep communist or his threats to shut down usa’s energy production
"The researchers traced the effects of those chains for up to 10 weeks following each event. During that time, an infected rallygoer might pass the virus to her grocer, who may pass it to his teenage son, who transmits it to his girlfriend, who could infect her piano teacher.
Roughly 1 out of every 150 such cases results in a death, current COVID-19 statistics suggest.
So, the '700 Deaths' is taken from the 10 week COVID infection reports which; 1) disregards any other possible sourcing and 2) makes no effort to determine associated factors in deaths. Thus this is, in spite of multiple protestations of 'sciencing' and no bias in the article by the lead researcher, a first wash of data using the generic "1 in a 150" death to infection ratio.
I call that bad science but, on the other hand, shouldn't the LA Times be cheering for Trump decreasing his own voters? Especially when we know that the dead vote 'D' almost exclusively!
I'd rather die on my feet than live on my knees.
“Honestly, MSM exists primarily to allow leftists to propagate talking points”
That and a jobs program for tens of thousands of sick MOFO’s with no other marketable job skills.
My analysis says that Trump rallies led to 330,000,000 additional American deaths from COVID. We’re all doomed!
So an “economist” uses “predictive modeling” and we are supposed to believe this is real?
Focusing on a death chain of events overlooks the actual fact that the Trump message, the Trump elation is also spreads by the samr chains.
Bottom line, a few deaths don’t matter....... Trump wins
Take it for the LA Slimes to run their “anything to help Biden” narrative all the way to Election Day! These idiots were peddling a story on theiir main page a few days ago that Ohio was a battleground state and Biden had a chance to win there! The NY Slimes and CNN are the worst of the media Democrat bootlickers! The LA Slimes isn’t too far behind!
Take it for the LA Slimes to run their “anything to help Biden” narrative all the way to Election Day! These idiots were peddling a story on theiir main page a few days ago that Ohio was a battleground state and Biden had a chance to win there! The NY Slimes and CNN are the worst of the media Democrat bootlickers! The LA Slimes isn’t too far behind!
Probably not as high as, oh say, a peaceful protest.
Partisan Media Shills update.
Says the traitorous, murder-by-abortion-supporting LA Times.
You can always make a “study” estimate whatever you want. Ain’t science great.
I’m pretty sure that socialist and communist rallies have led to way more deaths historically...
...but who’s counting?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.