[ExI] sturgis rolls on

Sat Aug 8 22:43:52 UTC 2020

> On Behalf Of BillK via extropy-chat

ubject: Re: [ExI] sturgis rolls on

On Sat, 8 Aug 2020 at 21:50, spike jones via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> 

>>. Do let us put our heads together on this, shall we?  There should be a
way to find out if the Sturgis rally kicked off a big new wave in a coupla
weeks, ja?  I know there is plenty of statistical talent here.

> 

> spike

> _______________________________________________

>.Well, bikers are not exactly popular with the media and the media enjoy
broadcasting the Covid panic, so I would expect any  new virus wave to have
headlines in every newspaper and TV news channel.

No research needed.

BillK.

_______________________________________________

Hi BillK, 

On the contrary sir, for part of it: agreed media love to broadcast covid
panic, but disagree bikers are not exactly popular.  Bikers are generally
popular in the mainstream press: we get killed a lot, giving them something
exciting to write about, as well as we help supply perfectly good organs,
which also results in heartwarming stories by donor recipients.  I plan to
donate my brain to Alcor, give the usable organs of it to anyone who wants
it, and have the rest of the junk fed to the ants.  But I digress.

The problem with that media approach is that it is too subjective, which is
why information coming from the mainstream press isn't particularly useful.
They are also generally contradictory.  We are told some South Dakota
political rally on 4 July resulted in a covid wave but I can't see it.  Can
you?

These numbers are pretty typical of other surrounding states with different
policies (South Dakota is filled with Swedish people and they do things
there Swedish style (the government didn't demand shutdowns generally.))

They didn't actually say what they meant by "surge," But I grew suspicious
when the same outlets claimed the political rally caused a surge in cases
but the riots did not.  Dubious.  How did the virus know which was which?
Both events look like a virus playground to me.

I did notice South Dakota reports zero recoveries, even though the early
cases were back five months ago.  I dug a little and discovered what that
means: in order to be recorded as recovered, the antibodies must be
undetectable.  By that reasoning, there are zero recoveries to date, and any
fatality with any co-morbidity, such as some drunken Harley rider embedding
herself in the grill of a Peterbilt can be counted as a Covid fatality so
long as she has detectable covid antibodies (ensuring the local hospital
gets paid (do pardon my cynical attitude please (we are harming ourselves
and distorting otherwise useful data with that payment model.)))

What we need is to create a database of Sturgis-goers, see if we can account
for some percentage of them, verify two weeks from now if they were catchers
or non-catchers.  I know of four people who are now at the rally.  Could we
organize a Friends-of-Sturgis online effort, create a data deposit site,
where we could try to account for them?  Then create a control group,
ideally in the same age-bracket, of stay-at-homers, calculate a ratio of
catchers to non-catchers.

spike

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