OT: The Sturgis Rally and COVID
TL;DR - Sturgis is estimated to be responsible for over 25%(!!) of cases in the month of August.
Should we bill the governor?
New @SDSUCHEPS paper by Dhaval Dave @FriedsonAndrew @Drew_McNichols & Joe Sabia ("Contagion Externality of Super-spreader") finds Sturgis Motorcycle Rally was a local & nationwide spreader of COVID-19. Estimated public health cost: ~$12B
— CHEPS (@SDSUCHEPS) September 6, 2020
See: https://t.co/uByz9ja6hL pic.twitter.com/jdLlLkwRek
September 8th, 2020 at 11:27 AM ^
hahaha ok flat front khaki boy
September 8th, 2020 at 12:04 PM ^
Wow - thanks for doing the deeper dive. So they are attributing 100% of cases in various counties to Sturgis. 100%!
That is absurd. This "study" should get thrown out within 30 seconds under any type of peer review. That's a terrible assumption they are making.
Of course, many people just look at headlines these days. Many people don't do any deeper dive into the analytics. Thank you for doing that deeper dive.
September 8th, 2020 at 11:22 AM ^
This virus continues to astound me.
Not only can it detect if someone is eating appetizers or an entree in NYC, it can now distinguish between a gathering of motorcycle enthusiasts from a social justice march.
Truly incredible.
September 8th, 2020 at 12:00 PM ^
It can distinguish between large corporate retail stores that donate to political campaigns from small retailers as well. It's amazing that a packed Walmart is no issue, but 3 people in a book store is a massive problem and that store needs to be closed. In NC we can drink at a restaurant, but can't drink at a bar. Until Friday night we were allowed to play basketball at the park but not let our kids on the playground (playgrounds are open now). Virus is prejudiced against small businesses and non-sport exercise, apparently.
September 8th, 2020 at 11:27 AM ^
Increased cases in the county of 4000 people by 25%....big f'ing deal. One positive person stopping by McD's could have the same effect.
September 8th, 2020 at 11:28 AM ^
So if we are going to go by the pretense that protests do not spread covid because protestors wore masks then why aren't we having full capacity stadiums with masks required?
If Sturgis is the cause for 250k outbreak but then you see summer images of protests where at least 1/3 if not more of the protestors were not wearing masks then I fail to see where contact tracing could have been honestly done. Or as we read, asking if covid positive patients went to a protest or not should have been a question and for most it was not.
Also, the premise of safety we are nearly a month out from Sturgis. I wonder why all of the reports are that Sturgis was unsafe but packing hundreds of thousands for political demonstrations and protests, marches and everything else is safe but not a biker rally... Don't give us the mask bs. All the mask studies have shown half of the masks are barely effective at all without social distancing and I've yet to see a socially distant mass protest.
September 8th, 2020 at 12:16 PM ^
To your first point we absolutely could.
September 8th, 2020 at 11:30 AM ^
So, what was expected to happen happened. Any lessons learned from this? Probably not. It would be fascinating to trace the path, spread and health outcomes for people that went to Sturgis and those that came into contact with those people.
September 8th, 2020 at 11:33 AM ^
I keep seeing people post that the protesters are wearing a mask and social distancing. That's not true. You can watch the videos and see protesters not wearing masks. The video that came out yesterday showing the BLM group going into the outside restaurant. The guy with the megaphone didn't have a mask on. The guy that came up and flipped over the dishes didn't have a mask. The woman that came up and drank the customers beer didn't have a mask on.
Here's a couple articles saying the protesters should be wearing a mask.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/09/style/mask-wearing-in-public.html
September 8th, 2020 at 11:35 AM ^
STICK TO THE SCRIPT! ORANGE MAN BAD!
September 8th, 2020 at 11:46 AM ^
If you want to be taken seriously (too late at this point, TBH), you shouldn't trot out "ORANGE MAN BAD."
September 8th, 2020 at 11:49 AM ^
thank you for the advice.
fortunately, i do not divine my self worth from someone's idea of me on an anonymous internet message board.
September 8th, 2020 at 12:00 PM ^
From your article. This is the research paper the writer is basing his article on. People that stay home to avoid the protests help keep the positive rate down.
whether the Black Lives Matter protests actually caused a net increase in population level spread of COVID-19 is an open question. While the protests themselves were large gatherings that do not match well with social distancing guidelines, the protesting population is not the only one that may have had a behavioral response. For example, other individuals who did not wish to participate in the protests, perhaps due to fear of violence from police clashes or general unrest, may have chosen to avoid public spaces while protests were underway. This could have an offsetting effect, increasing social distancing behavior in other parts of the population. The net effect, on both social distancing and on the spread of COVID-19 is thus an empirical question, and the focus of this study.
We conclude that predictions of population-level spikes in COVID-19 cases from Black Lives Matter protests were too narrowly conceived because of failure to account for non-participants’ behavioral responses to large gatherings.
September 8th, 2020 at 11:38 AM ^
Are people really still arguing for more shutdowns?
September 8th, 2020 at 11:45 AM ^
Well, for 56 more days at least.
Honestly, it's become complete bullshit. I just did a week-long trip out to Nevada and California. LOTS of people are out and about. And that's in SoCal, which is one of the areas with the strictest rules while also having a general left-of-center attitude among the populace.
And in that environment of LOTS of people being out and about, nationwide cases and positive rates are dropping noticeably.
We're going to have an NFL football game in 48 hours with 20,000 people in attendance. And, honestly, the world won't end because of that. Hopefully that will start to break the narrative a bit.
September 8th, 2020 at 5:01 PM ^
The world might not end but having so many schools closed to in-person instruction is a very bad outcome. Having things like fans in football stadiums and people inside at bars is a tragic error in priorities.
It's fair to make an argument that both should be happening, but it's impossible to argue the latter is more important than the former, and yet, that's what we've prioritized. Even here in CA the summer spike happened right after we opened indoor dining, gyms, movie theaters and whole bunch of things are FAAAARRRRR less important than having schools open.
So unless we just throw our hands up and say fine let's not limit anything, we need to be limiting these unnecessary things until kids are back in school.
September 8th, 2020 at 11:48 AM ^
Against all odds, they are.
September 8th, 2020 at 12:18 PM ^
Not yet. But they definitely want to keep the infected college kids in their campus housing. Sending them back home would be a terrible idea.
September 8th, 2020 at 11:39 AM ^
FYI the SDSU CHEPS has received funding from the Koch brothers and the lead author used to (and may still) support Trump. This is not coming from the left.
September 8th, 2020 at 11:43 AM ^
note to self: buy some Estimated public health cost stock!
September 8th, 2020 at 11:49 AM ^
Bro, if you didn't stock up in February, you missed the bubble
September 8th, 2020 at 11:55 AM ^
Not that I disbelieve that there were a lot of new covid-19 cases due to the Sturgis event, but how credible is this Twitter source? I general I don't believe Twitter news unless its verified elsewhere by actual news sites or outlets.
September 8th, 2020 at 1:43 PM ^
I personally am still trying to figure out who we can trust including news sources.
September 8th, 2020 at 5:10 PM ^
Well vetted news sources don't get it right 100% of the time but they try really hard to, because when they don't, they get skewered so there's at least a lot of accountability.
Random twitter guy can pretty much say anything he wants with no accountability so you still "trust but verify" with the news sources that have something to lose.
September 8th, 2020 at 12:04 PM ^
perhaps another sad example of the collateral damage caused by Darwin's natural selection
September 8th, 2020 at 12:30 PM ^
When was the last time Sturgis beat Ohio State? They shouldn't even be having rallies.
September 8th, 2020 at 2:08 PM ^
Man this place will never recover. Really wish Brian would just mercy kill this board.
September 8th, 2020 at 2:15 PM ^
And yet.....NPR shows 260 cases linked to the 500,000 attendees which is about 0.052%.
https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/09/02/908874…
Would be nice if they held their own peer review standards before publishing this kind of stuff. Or if not, why don't they do the same analysis for the protests that have been going on for months?
September 8th, 2020 at 2:47 PM ^
Hey, "peer review" is only important when it's for a study that doesn't fit ones particular narrative.
That this report is getting ANY traction --- much less being publicized widely on CNN and throughout the internet today --- says something about "science" today. It's pathetic. Absolutely 100% pathetic.
That analysis claims 100% (!!!) attribution of all cases in many counties to Sturgis. 100% attribution! Bull crap. No way, not at all. That should set of the BS detector for anyone who has even 3 brain cells.
56 days to go. Maybe this nonsense starts to change then. :-(
September 8th, 2020 at 5:12 PM ^
Spoiler alert: it's not going to change one bit in 56 days. Your assumptions underlying that hope are entirely off base.
Also, I think your interpretation is wrong about attribution. They concluded that counties with high rally attendees accounted for ~10% increase in cases compared to counties sending no attendees. That's a relatively straightforward statistical procedure that almost certainly removes noise because of the large number of counties that both sent attendees and those that did not.
Any small number of counties for which they attributed all new cases to the rally would have had to have had 1) very few if any cases before the rally and 2) a relatively small number of cases even after the rally so that's not really moving the needle on the overall analysis much.
It does seem excessive to think that a quarter of all cases around the country could be attributable to this event but I don't think your specific beefs with the analysis are valid, per se.
September 8th, 2020 at 6:09 PM ^
Who's "they" here? The study authors?
There's a reason NPR only shows 260 confirmed traced cases. And that's because we have really, really poor contact tracing in the US. It also doesn't seek to trace the cases linked to those cases, and the ones linked to those and so one, where this statistical analysis does attempt to quantify the full impact.
Polling shows that in a lot of places, response rates to contract tracing calls are less than 25% and many of those end up with the person refusing to cooperate. Contrast to Iceland where over 99 percent of people help tracers and in New Zealand where over 86 percent cooperated. We simply value our individualism and privacy more here. That's good sometimes, not so good as it relates to a public health crisis.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/08/contact-tracing-hr…
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-tracing-specialre…
How cooperative do you think people that attended this rally were relative to the American public as a whole? Likely that a negligible number of actual cases related to this were confirmed by contact tracing.
That's why a statistical method that they used is more likely to reach something approximating the actual impact.
September 9th, 2020 at 12:52 AM ^
So I ask again, if this one event is now blamed for 260,000 people getting covid, what happened during the protests the last 100 days? The magic of the masks saved everyone? If that's true, why can't LA county get their cases under control considering if they've had a mandate since May 14th?
September 8th, 2020 at 3:18 PM ^
Xm is a passive aggressive extraordinare.
September 8th, 2020 at 3:49 PM ^
As someone who thinks holding Sturgis was dumb and clearly was going to lead to the spread of Covid this is perhaps the most obvious piece of bullshit I have ever seen. The headline alone is reason to know its bullshit. The thing did not even start until August 7 and ended on August 16. The virus has up to a ten day incubation period where the person who is infected will not be contagious for at least some of that time. Its not like you catch it and five minutes later can give it to someone else. So, in the 2 to 3 weeks from when Sturgis was occurring, where a few hundred of the attendees had positive results, we get to Sturgis caused 250,000 cases, in August?
How does this even get published?
September 8th, 2020 at 5:51 PM ^
South Dakota state officials are saying the paper is fiction.
“This report isn’t science; it’s fiction. Under the guise of academic research, this report is nothing short of an attack on those who exercised their personal freedom to attend Sturgis,” Noem said.
State epidemiologist Dr. Joshua Clayton said the paper is “white paper” which is not peer-reviewed. He also noted schools opened in South Dakota closely after the Sturgis Rally ended, which could have also played a role in the recent rise of COVID-19 cases in South Dakota.
September 8th, 2020 at 6:15 PM ^
That is a shock. I am so shocked they would do that.
The school opening argument is pretty much baseless, though. Most of the analysis revolves around what happened in the many, many counties to which people returned after the rally and in doing so they controlled for schools reopening because they compared to counties from which there were no rally attendees.
I admit that the numbers seem high, but the methodology appears pretty sound based on what I've seen (and I'm a UM actuarial mathematics graduate).
September 8th, 2020 at 6:38 PM ^
The AP numbers were a lot lower too.
The number of cases estimated in the study differs significantly from the number of cases tied to the rally reported by the South Dakota Department of Health. As of Tuesday, the state reported 124 cases among South Dakota residents who got sick after attending the rally.
The Associated Press as of last week identified 290 cases from 12 states tied to the rally.
September 8th, 2020 at 7:14 PM ^
It’s fake
September 8th, 2020 at 7:14 PM ^
Also I heard 9/10 cities with spikes were college towns. That doesn’t add up. Huge bullshit
September 8th, 2020 at 9:59 PM ^
Good thing 99.9% will be fine in 2 weeks and hardly any will be hospitalized.
September 9th, 2020 at 11:49 AM ^
Shocked. I find this news shocking! Lab error??
OK. Not shocked.
September 10th, 2020 at 3:51 AM ^
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/sturgis-rally-may-have-caused-250-…
"The nonprofit company’s findings have not been corroborated by epidemiologists or public health officials."