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Comment by georgewfraser | Hacker News Reader

The entire category of "is X associated with COVID" research is a recipe for p-hacking, because you're looking at relationships between slowly changing variables, with all sorts of confounds, and there are so many ways to do multiple regression/synthetic controls/and so on. It ends up telling you as much about the priors of the researchers as anything else. My favorite example of this is the research group that found that the Sturgis motorcycle rally increased COVID:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/soej.12475

But the same research group found that BLM protests did not:

https://www.nber.org/papers/w27408

It's possible that both are true, but it's a bit suspicious that these findings are so well-aligned with the probable political associations of the authors.

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Disclaimer: I probably share a lot of those political leanings. With that said...

My understanding was that there were a lot of “mask-skeptic” folks at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally openly flaunting safety protocols and doing stuff like hanging out in packed bars with no mask on. Sure, you can get away with some amount of line-stepping and even straight up rule-breaking and still not catch Covid, but when you have a gathering of people for whom flaunting Covid restrictions is actually a form of virtue-signalling... well it’s probably not going to end great.

Having attended the BLM protests myself (in Baltimore), I don’t think I saw a single person not wearing a mask. I’m sure they existed somewhere in America, but I’m pretty sure if you showed up without a mask someone would give you a disposable one. Why do I think that? Because there were also folks with hand sanitizer pumps giving away hand sanitizer for free. The walking marches were not perfectly socially distanced, but with everyone wearing masks and walking about 3ft apart in the open air, it makes sense that there would’ve been less spread. There were also marches that were done as parades of cars so that folks who were more at-risk for Covid had a safer way to participate.

Again, good intent alone won’t stop the spread of a disease (it doesn’t care if you’re “trying real hard” to be safe). But when the culture of a group is focused around taking the virus seriously and trying to balance the goals of the movement with keeping people safe, it makes sense that you’ll have better outcomes.

To the bar point, I'd say it's a pretty common belief at this point that some combination of masks and distancing are important inside while, outside, it makes much less of a difference especially if you're at least somewhat distanced.

Around where I live, people are being pretty good about protocols inside. Outside? I don't live in a city but on trails and so forth, the common pattern is people will pull up a gaiter if they're going to pass a group wearing masks. These days, almost no one is. When I do pull up a gaiter it feels like theater.

You don't think there might have been a difference in the behaviors and beliefs of the attendees of those two events?

The answer is that Sturgis had indoor parts too, whereas its hard to protest in groups outdoors.

The difference is that people felt unsafe during the BLM protests because they also lead to riots as well. A lot of people stayed at home, who otherwise would have gone outside. I skimmed another paper that reached a similar conclusion. A motorcycle rally doesn't have the same effect.

Not sure why I'm getting downvoted here. That is literally the reason specified by the paper posted by OP.

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