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Comment by austincheney | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if that data can be correlated against recent Covid spikes. The cities in Texas showing the most dramatic rise in diagnosis are also those that experienced the largest quantities of protests delayed exactly the same amount of time as the incubation period.

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That wouldn't explain the flat rates in NYC [0] or Minneapolis and St. Paul (Hennepin/Ramsey County) [1]

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/new-york-coronav...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/minnesota-corona...

edit: Also, Texas had a Phase 3 reopening on June 3, which is around the time of peak protest: https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-announces-ph...

A few weeks ago, I remember Cuomo patting himself and New Yorkers on the back for continuing to see a decline in cases. It's a lot easier to do that when 20% of NYC residents have antibodies to SARS-CoV-2, and that was in May. I'm sure this limited spread during protests somewhat in NYC.

That said, social distancing during protests, being outdoors, how many people had active infections (this varies wildly across the US), mask use, actions (positive and negative) by the police, and living situations of the protesters (alone in an apartment or four roommates) all have an effect.

Only in the presence of social distancing or other countermeasures.

20% antibodies means that you could have an R = 1.25 and still get an effective R < 1.0, preventing further onwards transmission. R0 estimates for COVID-19 ranged from 2.5-6, so by itself 20% of the population with antibodies wouldn't do anything (it'd reduce R to 2-4.8, which is still pretty quick exponential spread, faster than the flu). However, R in the U.S. around the time of the protests was measured at about 1.07, because it wasn't fully opened up yet and many people are staying home out of fear. Under those conditions NYC gets an effective R = 0.85 (epidemic dies out), while a state with 2% antibodies has an effective R = 1.05, which is still positive (albeit slow) exponential spread.

I suspect it's a combination of the lax social distancing requirements + lack of immunity. NYC would still be experiencing exponential spread without existing immunity, but it's only because they're still locked down that the level of immunity they have can prevent an epidemic.

I was initially concerned about that. But it appears that protests didn't cause big spikes, or even detectable spikes, probably for two reasons: first, the protests were outdoors. Second, almost all the protesters wore masks. The recent super-spreader events have mainly been large indoor gatherings, parties and the like.

I rarely like to trot out the 'correlation is not causation' thing, but that's just what you'd expect given the large population. but it's not borne out in other places, eg Florida has not had massive protests but they are suffering from a big spike in coronavirus cases. And if we look at this stats page focusing on California down to the county level (but also including other state data), you can see that the rate of increase is not really well correlated with protest activity after all unless you cherry-pick the data .

https://ca-covid-r.info/

Considering cell phone companies in the US already have this data have this data and have been anonymizing it for covid-19 research, and considering public health officials are doing some degree of contact tracing, it's pretty strange how little information has been coming out about how and where most people have been getting it. Not just in the context of protests, even before that, it's been a huge hole in data released to the public.

Occam's razor suggests un-wise decisions like re-opening bars in the midst of an unprecedented global pandemic, and undermining currently-accepted best practices like having the general public wear masks, would be the first things one should consider in determining the cause of recent Covid spikes in Texas.

Not saying protests couldn't / don't have an effect. Saying that if we want to determine the root cause of the dramatic rise of Covid-19 in Texas, let's be logical about it.

[EDIT: Instead of calling Texas's decisions stupid, I changed my language to "un-wise", in the interests of precision.]

Unwise, but also unintelligent. Either stat would tell you this was a bad idea.

Doesn't explain New York where Covid is just a little over 100 new cases/day. And there were, and still are, plenty of protests.

Maybe they achieved hard immunity? The spike there was much taller / narrower than elsewhere, leading to the ironic situation where the worst handling of the disease leads to great numbers once past the peak. Compare to CA where the curve was flattened and then leveled out - had we allowed exponential growth here we would also likely see fewer cases today.

I used to look at the BLM protest videos to determine how many of them wore masks and a vast majority of them did in the videos I saw. Meanwhile those protesting the lockdowns and going to bars and beaches hardly did any.

Herd immunity for COVID-19 is 60-85% of the population. (The formula is 1 - 1 / R0; intuitively, the average person spreads the virus to R0 other people, so if only 1 / R0 people are still susceptible, effective R = R0 * 1 / R0 = 1 and the epidemic reaches a steady-state instead of growing.) NYC antibody tests have indicated about 20% immunity. They're still a long way away from herd immunity.

No they haven't.

Minneapolis and Seattle testing related to the protestors has not shown a spike in cases [1,2,3].

[1] https://www.twincities.com/2020/06/12/mn-coronavirus-george-...

[2] https://abcnews.go.com/US/minnesota-sees-rise-covid-19-cases...

[3] https://komonews.com/news/local/fewer-than-1-of-seattle-prot...

As someone who lives in Texas, I'd point out that Texas "reopened" before the protests and I saw people with huge public gatherings and birthday and pool parties and no masks.

This NBER study suggests that protests had, if anything, a slightly favorable impact on infection rates: https://www.nber.org/papers/w27408

That doesn't explain Florida. The biggest days of protests nationwide were rained out in FL.

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