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quote:
ORIGINAL: David Levine
And since this seems to be a big enough story that literally everyone from CNN to FOX News posted it, and since "I know me" well enough to know I'm out of my league with these kinds of numbers, I asked some friends for their input:
Friend 1:
How many confirmed cases among attendees?
I see 260 as of a week ago. What proportion of actual cases is that? I haven’t been following the latest studies as closely, but I’ll use this july data as a basic framework:
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html
40%-70% asymptomatic (I’ll use the upper number and there’s a good chance more people would be infected with mild symptoms and not report it)
6 days between infection and infecting another person
R0 2.5 (just to simplify let’s assume all 2.5 infected on day 6
Aug 7-16 (24-33 days ago) – ~4-5 infection periods
So say it’s 850 direct infections. That would get us in the neighborhood of 80k cases by now. 2500 cases (i.e. the confirmed cases from a week ago are in the neighborhood of 10% of the actual cases) gets us to 250k. That doesn’t seem outlandish to me, and would represent 0.05% of ~500k attendees becoming infected. That’s roughly in-line with high-transmission states reported new-case rates.
Obviously huge error bars on this napkin math, but for a gathering of that many people without great distancing, 250k is certainly in the realm of possibility. Regardless of the actual number, there are almost certainly going to be a meaningful number of extra deaths among non-attendees and strain on the health care system.
Friend 2 (responding to Friend 1):
I like your math.
But let’s say the error bars are large say 20-30% we’d still be talking about 200K cases. To the point, even if it was only 50K cases, it’s a ridiculous outcome in the sense of how bad it is. Putting a dollar value on it moves it into the realm of something most folks can understand, though I am sure the value assigned depends on a ton of assumptions.
However, the people who give a crap already know it was an exercise in extreme and wanton stupidity, the people who attended and will end up with COVID don’t care until they end up debilitated or dead, any other outcome is not severe enough to matter.
This is interesting and it could have happened like that, but the national numbers have a hard time supporting this at all. Actually, I would say that they clearly refute the likelihood of any of that having actually happened.
Sturgis starts on August 2: 63,152 daily COVID cases averaged in the last 7 days.
Less than a month after Sturgis ended: 38,101 daily COVID cases averaged in the last 7 days.
These numbers are from here: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
So we had a 'super-spreader event' and the national numbers took their biggest dip, I believe, in the whole pandemic during that time? At some point, doesn't the actual national data tell us that this massive super-spreading event did not happen?
I know I am probably on a little island here, but I actually care only about the actual numbers and how science/economics is done. If we start pawning data analysis off as real when it says nothing of the sort, do we believe a real study next time?
I can certainly agree that a super-spreader event COULD have happened at Sturgis, but it does not appear that it did. Just like the BLM rallies COULD have been super-spreader events, but they did not appear to be.
Does that means it was a great idea? No, probably not.
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RE: Covid 19 and those infected - 
Picture those merged.
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