[ExI] bikers again and smallpox

[spike at rainier66.com]

> On Behalf Of Keith Henson via extropy-chat
Subject: Re: [ExI] bikers again and smallpox

The 10-day Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota in August, which drew more than 400,000 people, has now been linked to more than
250,000 coronavirus cases, according to a study by the IZA Institute
of Labor Economics.   The event will cost an estimated $12.2 billion
in health-care costs, they wrote.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/sturgis-motorcycle-rally-in-south-dakota-in-august-linked-to-more-than-250000-coronavirus-cases-study-finds-2020-09-08

Keith


OK, do let us run with that please.  With half a million attendees, somehow we ended up with half of those getting covid?  Indeed?  Or is there some mysterious multiplication factor?  Do let us assume there is, and we don't understand it yet.

These economists extrapolated from an estimated 260 cases where bikers are thought to have caught the virus at the rally.  This goes thru the mysterious transformation and turns into 250k cases at a cost of 12.2 billion.

OK.  If we take the background cases in the USA, I am getting about 550k new cases since the start of the rally a month ago yesterday.  If we assume 550k new US cases since then and we consider any randomly chosen half million people in the USA would represent about 1/700th of the US population, so we expect that half people to suffer about 800 cases per day, or about 2400 cases per half million since the start of the rally.  

We have seen what we think are 260 cases linked to Sturgis.  So the Sturgis rate is about an eighth what we expect.  OK then.  If that half million had stayed home, we could expect rather than the 260 cases, 2400, which would leverage mysteriously (according to these economists) about 2.4 million people, at a cost to of an estimated 110 billion dollars.

They estimated the cost at 12.2 billion, but had those bikers stayed home, by their estimates we save right at 100 billion dollars.

But wait, we are not finished here.  We still haven't figured out what is protecting those bikers.

Let us go to the US covid death rate.  In the approximately 20 days since the end of the rally, there have been about 20,000 US covid fatalities, for an average of about 1000 covid fatalities per day.  Any randomly chosen half million Americans then are about 1/700th of the US population, so about... 1.3 fatalities per day average per half million Americans.  But so far we have seen among the half million Sturgis goers a fatality total of... 1.  So why do these bikers keep not dying?  That seems terribly stubborn of those half million bikers to keep not dying while their randomly-chosen half million neighbors keep handing 1.3 proles down into the ground every day.

And if the estimated 260 Sturgis new cases cost 12.2 billion in healthcare costs, can we not use the same reasoning to estimate that the Sturgis rally is now saving billions of dollars a day?  

Why do these bikers keep not dying?

spike