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Comment by encoderer | Hacker News Reader

Hold up, did you look at a graph of cases? It has an incubation period. Absolutely every single one of those things is associated with a spike.

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Good point. I see a spike in cases in mid-to-late June. Now ... what happened in early June that might lead to a spike in cases. Involving large crowds of very random people congregating together, perhaps shouting. Hmm. Well ...

It's my understanding that the spikes are associated with earlier events than the two-ish week single infection incubation period because for the case spikes, you have to have a few rounds of infection aka exponential growth before the infection rate impact makes a blip.

As in: If you got 10k new cases in mid/late June, it's not "because" 10k people got infected at one event in early June, but because 10k ppl got infected in early June from 5k people who got infected in late July from ~3k people who got infected in early July from ~1k people who get infected in late May from one event.

Note: Specific numbers pulled out of my ass as an easy way to convey the idea.

Protests were found to not be correlated with covid. Spring break however was.

Things that increase the risk of infection:

- spreader lacks mask

- infectee lacks mask

- indoors

- spreader speaks

- length of time spreader and infectee spend in contact

The speaking part is a wash -- plenty of speaking at both protests and spring break. The rest of them all are chiefly problems with spring break, chiefly because people frequently socialize indoors as they did at Sturgis.

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