[ExI] bikers again and smallpox

[Mike Dougherty]

Last Friday, I mentioned this conversation to someone I work with.  He
followed up with this link today:
https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2020-09-08/sturgis-motorcycle-rally-may-have-caused-over-250-000-coronavirus-cases-report


I replied to him as follow:

I don't really know how to properly model the numbers being thrown around.
I think that's the interesting conversation.  How 400,000 people can lead
to 250,000 cases would suggest >60% infection rate.  That there is only one
death attributed to either 250k cases or 400k attendees makes coronavirus …
not worth the hype.  Cell phone tracking as an authoritative source of
truth - based on what other reliability studies can that be trusted?  Yeah,
ok, so I'm reaching… but it feels like all of it is reaching.  If Sturgis
event is 8/7 - 8/16 but cases are reported from 8/2 to 9/2 … there's
considerable "slop" in what is being counted.  A 7-12% increase in cases
for counties with rally attendees compared to without, but then reporting
Meade county as 6 to 7 per 1000 is a rate of not 6 or 7 percent, but 0.6 or
0.7 percent.  So that mixture in unit of measure is either numerical
incompetence (the default assumption with benefit of the doubt) or it's
intentionally obfuscating facts to push a narrative.  Throw in that "It
also found that the rally generated $12.2 billion in public health costs"
(the one doing the finding is not obvious, the rally itself is vilified
with an unambiguous direct-action verb "generated".  The last bit of that
sentence admits those numbers are based on "statistical cost of a COVID-19
case" (but the superfluous clauses of a sentence are typically ignored or
not remembered)  Again you could call me on reading too much into the
careful construction(s) here, but the next sentence then proposes that
amount would have been enough "to pay each rally goer $26,000 to not
attend" - that's a point that completely displaces the critical thinking
needed to process the previous sentence with a sensational thought about
getting paid… meanwhile we can't seem to agree that giving the stay-at-home
more than $1200 every few months.  So we "lost" $26k/person for 400k
Sturgis attendees, but we can't afford the bribe to stay home (UBI triggers
people over the socialist support it provides, but if you call it a bribe
or allowance with the requirement to stay home… then it's not exactly
"unconditional" income… but it serves the same purpose of a social safety
measure)  The last paragraph even states "… is an overestimate of the
externality cost … we nonetheless conclude … this event was substantial"  -
without comparisons to health cases of past Sturgis events or similar
conditions/size events, it's so easy to "conclude"
whatever-the-hell-you-want.  The disclosure sentences are obscured with
bamboozling and gobbledegook, while the narrative-supporting takeaways use
simple words and shorter sentences.



Maybe the author wasn't a genius wordsmith constructing a devastatingly
convincing article.  Maybe it's human nature to tell a tale in a way that
carries a meme from brain to brain.  Maybe writers have spent their whole
careers serving the spread of memes.  The best writers are self-aware and
can see their bias/memeplex, and still write a fair article.  The rest
simply toss enough words together to meet the deadline for article
submission.  So in the flurry of content-creation, the default narrative is
strengthened by all those who repeat the same signal.



To come all the way back around to my initial point:  I don't know how to
think about it.  The friend I quoted skipped Sturgis and observed that it
was a non-political rally, so would have a very different population than
the now-common political rabble-rousing.  His observance was that Sturgis
should have had many more _deaths_ associated to it, but that there might
be something about the nature of that event that mitigated deaths in a
significant way.  Later email exchanges seems to have landed on the Sturgis
attendees spend more time in the sun while on long rides (like those
necessary to get 400k bikers to Sturgis) and the endogenous buildup of
vitamin D3 has prophylactic effects.  Perhaps having lower overall stress
selects for those with lower inflammation and therefore less existing
vascular damage (I suspect those bikers could be considered privileged to
have bikes as hobby/toys and can afford their relaxation in ways that …
less-privileged and more at-risk populations cannot)  There might even be
some value in a boomer population with the diet of convenience store
hotdogs and afternoon coffee … whether it's direct, or because they're
already on medications that control blood pressure, cholesterol,
anti-coags, etc.


On Tue, Sep 8, 2020 at 8:51 PM Keith Henson via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> 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
>
>
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