It has become a widespread meme that the many protests over the murder of George Floyd and other racially based police brutality will show that it is fine to end all shutdowns related to the pandemic and end all rules about social distancing and wearing face masks. Here we are reaching two weeks since these protests with thousands of people involved, supposedly all violating those rules, and we are not seeing a surge of Covid-19 cases coming out of the locations where these big protests have happened.
Well, it turns out, that while the reports are scattered, apparently at many of the protests many people wear face masks, not only that, there is apparently a lot of trying to keep some distance from each other as well, although based on the performance of nations in East Asia, it is pretty clear that the wearing of face masks is the most useful. Among other cities with large protests where this has been observed is Philadelphia. But in many places there has been much urging of this.
It is a mere anecdote, but I can report that I attended one such protest, admittedly in peaceful Harrisonburg, VA where I live where we have a black mayor and a black police chief. But I attended a peaceful protest with over 1000 people. Almost everybody was wearing a mask, and most people were keeping distance from each other. There has been a lot of this.
So, this meme widely spouted with great arrogance by many observers is just misleading. It is quite likely we shall see no spike of cases following most of these protests, although possibly in some locations. But that does not mean this will hold for places where reopenings coincide with lots of people imitating our president and not wearing face masks or maintaining social distancing. And indeed, we are seeing surges of cases in many such states, with the vast majority of those being where we have seen such attitudes and policies.
Barkley Rosser
Barkley:
Protestors without masks in Lansing, MI did cause spikes in confirmed Covid cases and a reversal of the decline going from < 1 to > 1.
There were more than 33,000 new confirmed coronavirus cases in the United States yesterday and we should collectively be especially careful. We are in the midst of the pandemic here and now, and for our sake and the sake of others care is necessary.
June 20, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 2,297,642)
Deaths ( 121,414)
There are several factors in play here:
1. Protests were conducted in the open air, which greatly diminished the chances of getting infected. Infections predominantly occur in closed spaces.
2. Most protesters are young and will the exception of a tiny percent of young women are not morbidly obese 😉
3. Summer is the time when most coronavirus epidemics subside.
4. Many protestors are wearing masks to make face detection more difficult.
5. Most protesters are reluctant to undergo any tests. Especially looters 😉 So we might see family clusters but much later.
Anne note about 33K new positive tests means little as number of daily cases is a very unreliable stats. Many cases are reported with the delay on up to three days, which can create accidental bumps.
Five or 20 days averages are better metrics.
BTW in no way, they are equal to cases of infections; they are at least 20% higher as many people are tested several times, and the reliability of the test itself is only around 80%.
The general level of incompetence and fearmongering of the USA MSM is such that a positive test is viewed as the case of infection, and the population now views them as equivalent. This is incorrect.
BTW the 20 days average for June is around 23K a day, and is about the same as in May, so from this point of view we can’t talk about increases in new cases but only about the plateau reached.
This is also true because the quality of data (especially for deaths) is very low (the error margin should be assumed to be +-10% at least ).
Lol, BLM protests barely exist in terms of size. You could spread a bit, but it wouldn’t be large enough subgroup to produce large infections.
Likbez, your 5 and 20 day averages are rising too…new daily cases bottomed June 7 thru 9 at around 19,000 a day and have been rising since…
We are again experiencing dramatic increases in coronavirus infections, and there is no excuse for having failed or failing to take proper care. The idea that we can be excused because we coach or play college football or are protesting important injustice is unfortunate:
June 20, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 2,313,822)
Deaths ( 121,652)
@rjs June 20, 2020 12:54 pm
Yes, you are right.
Five days average increased from ~22700 (Jun 1) to ~27000 (Jun 19)
20 days average from ~22500 to ~24000.
The increase actually started from May 30. and ended the period of decrease from May 5 to May 29, so I would not attribute the increase from Jun 13 to protests
As Bert Schlitz mentioned the number of participants in them was too small to make a statistically significant difference for sample of the size of the USA population.
20 days increase for the period Jun 1-Jun 19 is just 4%, 5 days – 15%. So only 5-days average increase might be statistically significant.
Even so, what factors are in play is unclear and attributing them to BLM protests is IMHO is pseudo-science.
In other words, the period of decrease from Jun 08 to Jun 12 that you are referring to, in this sense, was kind of an anomaly. June trend is a slight increase, not decrease due to the facts we do not know about.
BTW you can get artificial increase by just increasing the scope of testing and/or the lowering the quality of the mass used tests (not all tests are created equal)
If you test all that population of the USA with the average quality tests and we assume that for them the false positive rate is 20% you will get 330*0.2=66 million of “infected” people.
If you lower the quality to 30% you will get 100 million of “infected” which are completely fake.
“Do BLM Protests Prove No More Pandemic?”
What an unfortunate question:
June 20, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 2,318,630)
Deaths ( 121,750)
@anne June 20, 2020 1:19 pm
Anne, it looks like you operate on the intellectual level of ZeroHedge. They are short sellers, are you ?
We have undone all our cautions and coronavirus infections are increasing dangerously as ever:
June 20, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 2,329,817)
Deaths ( 121,979)
BLM protests probably have more to say about how seriously people are taking the pandemic rather than the status of the pandemic. People are hungry for some good times and that could be going boating, eating out or marching in a protest. Maybe the severity of the worst weeks in New York/New Jersey/ Connecticut is the essential reference now. “Not as bad as New York = hey, not bad”.
Another 33,000 new confirmed coronavirus cases, but for the media this seems to make little difference other than for scoring political points. Nonetheless, many people are deeply worried and will live in ways that reflect such worry indefinitely. We have collectively undone the efforts made that promised to be successful mere weeks ago:
June 20, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 2,330,578)
Deaths ( 121,980)
“Do BLM Protests Prove No More Pandemic?”
A question I find deeply disturbing in the suggestion that the pandemic can be dismissed according to political leanings.
anne,
The title of the post was a response to claims of this sort made by Trump supporters who were running around saying, “See, here all these people gathering in crowds, with hypocritical libtards saying it is fine even as rhey have criticized us for supporting widespread reopenings with no mask wearing or social distancing, so if there is no surge from these protests that shows we are right, and it is fine to charge back to normalcy.”
So I noted that while there is not much evidence of spikes following such protests (I have seen one claim of it happening in Lansing, MI and one of it happening in Boulder, CO), widespread reports suggest that lots of protesters have been wearing masks, which increasingly look to be crucial to reducing transmission of the virus. Where we see the worst spikes of new cases are in states where there has not been much mask wearing as they have extensively reopened.
I thought you had gotten this before, so a bit mystified by this comment at this point.