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Comment by bmarquez | Hacker News Reader

It's true that you can't argue with data, but what if you're not allowed to collect the data. How can you criticize what you can't measure?

As an example, NYC contact tracers were forbidden[1] to ask if people attended a protest.

[1]https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/nyc-s-contact-tracers-have...

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NYC contact tracers were forbidden to ask if people attended a protest

Refusing to collect that data point is completely understandable from a public health standpoint. There is substantiated concern that people may end up on cop shitlists for attending a protest, we know that there is police overreach, and the only way to keep the pigs out of the trough is not providing it at all. NYPD is notoriously corrupt. If any single person ended up being harassed by the cops as a result for telling the truth no one will ever work with a contact tracer again.

Sad that the cops can't restrain themselves in a time of public emergency but that's the reality we live in.

Very relevant point. We can't trust the science if the science isn't allowed to see certain things.

Not relevant at all. The government cannot be trusted to gather lists of protest attendees since they would be immediately used for retaliation.

Statistics can be looked at in aggregate. Infections did not go up in areas with large protests.

The BLM tribe has safer Covid behaviour in general than the other side, though, outside their protest attendance. That's a pretty big confounding variable.

that's why the authors of these studies have been using anonymized cellphone data to study concentrations of people and subsequent changes (if any) in case loads.

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