Sturgis Motorcycle Rally was 'superspreading event,' cost public health $12.2B
thehill.com
thehill.com
Copying over some key points from the underlying paper [1]:
> In counties with the largest relative inflow to the event, the per 1,000 case rate increased by 10.7 percent after 24 days following the onset of Sturgis Pre-Rally Events. Multiplying the percent case increases for the high, moderate-high and moderate inflow counties by each county’s respective pre-rally cumulative COVID-19 cases and aggregating, yields a total of 263,708 additional cases in these locations due to the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. Adding the number of new cases due to the Rally in South Dakota estimated by synthetic control (3.6 per 1,000 population, scaled by the South Dakota population of approximately 858,000) brings the total number of cases to 266,796 or 19 percent of 1.4 million new cases.
> If we conservatively assume that all of these cases were non-fatal, then these cases represent a cost of over $12.2 billion, based on the statistical cost of a COVID-19 case of $46,000 estimated by Kniesner and Sullivan (2020).
The Kniesner and Sullivan paper cited [2] gets to the value of $46,000 by using the Department of Transportation's "value per statistical life" of about $10 million per death (scaled down to ~$11k per asymptomatic case), which is not a public health cost estimate. It's probably far higher than what hospitals and the health system spends per case.
Not only that, but the paper claims, without any controls, that ALL case count increases in counties that sent lots of people to the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in the weeks following it were caused by the Rally itself. They did not control for any other factors (e.g., the baseline spread of COVID in adjacent counties with lower attendance.) This is unplausible, given that other factors and events (e.g., college parties, indoors dining) may have also contributed.
[1] http://ftp.iza.org/dp13670.pdf
[2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3680348
Hearsay is not an argument.
That sounds like the kind of big news you should have no trouble finding a citation for.
> The other 94% had other health issues as well and it can’t be said any longer that their death is related to c19.
That's a funny definition of "related". The presence of other contributing factors does not mean that none of the blame lies with the coronavirus.
Besides the other 94%, simply not dying is not the best metric either. The better metric is causing any serious harm, not just fatalities.
Over 40% of the US is obese, for example, which increases your likelihood of a fatal outcome. So if you are obese and 40, it’s unlikely that you’d otherwise die in 2020. But if you get Covid and die from it, you’re a part of that 94%.
I don't see how that is at odds with anything you said.
This misrepresentation has been dangerously incorrectly stated either intentionally or ignorantly by people who have an agenda to push, and that agenda isn’t in service to public health.
(Direct links to fact checking sites: [1] [2])
[0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=covid+6%25
[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cdc-mortality-statistics/
[2] https://www.factcheck.org/2020/09/cdc-did-not-admit-only-6-o...
This guy (blumomo) is arguing in bad faith and yet keeps doubling down. An all-too-common behavior pattern these days.
Focusing on one parameter to throw out the whole paper would be junk science.
However, if it is the case that the authors did use that estimate for a per-asymptomatic case cost, then I think it's perfectly valid to throw out the rest of the paper as nonsense. I mean, the only reason anyone is talking about this paper at all is because the top-line number is so outrageously high. If a fundamental calculation going into that number is that patently ridiculous, I don't care if you have 15 pages or 1500 pages, adding more pages of numbers can't get around the absurdity of the underlying primary assumption.
This analysis is complete, utter, and total bullshit. They took a "value per statistical life" number of $11 million, then pulled a semi random 0.3% out of their ass to account for an $11k cost per asymptomatic case. At no point did they actually attempt to account anywhere for the true cost of treating (or, in this case not treating) an asymptomatic case.
These numbers are complete garbage.
Anyone have an idea on where that dollar amount came from? If many infections are asymptomatic then surely that number could only be associated with people who exhibit complications.
Something doesn't seem to add up.
> Using standard assumptions provided by the CDC, we estimate that as of July 27, 2020, the actual number of cumulative Covid-19 cases in the U.S. is about 47 million with almost 1 million involving hospitalizations. Applying value per statistical life (VSL) and relative severity/injury estimates from the Department of Transportation (DOT), we estimate an overall non-fatal unadjusted valuation of $2.2 trillion for the U.S. with a weighted average value of about $46,000 per case.
Note that they're not saying the health care or direct costs are $46,000 but instead that it is a statistically useful value -- and it only applies to non-fatal cases of COVID-19, so it actually excludes the "worst case" outcome. As a result, it's an alarming number, but it's meant to illustrate how much the government might consider reasonable to spend to prevent folks from getting COVID-19 -- its impact to the economy, and it has to be balanced against the significant economic impact that other COVID mitigations have already had, particularly for those who have not been at risk of getting or spreading COVID-19 but still are economically disadvantaged by the mitigations.
It's kind of a brutal way of thinking about it. How much is one life worth, in dollars, for regulation and decision-making purposes? I haven't read it, but https://muse.jhu.edu/book/64735 came up in Google searches and looks moderately interesting and relevant here.
It didn't get any appreciable national coverage because nobody broke anything, but the size of the march was roughly ~10% of the in-the-city-limits population of the city. Judging by the number of colleagues and friends we encountered, a substantial fraction of those marching were local.
It's not the impression I have. I saw photos of large crowds, chanting and singing, etc. at the protests.
[...]
At least 260 cases in 11 states have been officially connected to the rally by government officials.
[...]
Most people who attended the event did not take coronavirus precautions like wearing masks and social distancing, The Associated Press reported at the time."
""we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people in the United States." The letter conceded that mass protests carried the risk of spreading coronavirus": https://reason.com/2020/06/04/george-floyd-protesters-corona...
“In this moment the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus.”: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/04/public-hea...
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investi...
https://www.businessinsider.com/nyc-contact-tracers-not-aski....
http://ftp.iza.org/dp13388.pdf
> This study uses newly collected data on protests in 315 of the largest U.S. cities to estimate the impacts of mass protests on social distancing and COVID-19 case growth. Event-study analyses provide strong evidence that net stay-at-home behavior increased following protest onset, consistent with the hypothesis that non-protesters’ behavior was substantially affected by urban protests. This effect was not fully explained by the imposition of city curfews. Estimated effects were generally larger for persistent protests and those accompanied by media reports of violence. Furthermore, we find no evidence that urban protests reignited COVID-19 case growth during the more than three weeks following protest onset. We conclude that predictions of broad negative public health consequences of Black Lives Matter protests were far too narrowly conceived.