<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr">Last Friday, I mentioned this conversation to someone I work with. He followed up with this link today:<div><a href="https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2020-09-08/sturgis-motorcycle-rally-may-have-caused-over-250-000-coronavirus-cases-report">https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2020-09-08/sturgis-motorcycle-rally-may-have-caused-over-250-000-coronavirus-cases-report</a> <br><div><br></div><div>I replied to him as follow:</div><div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif;color:rgb(31,73,125)">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. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif;color:rgb(31,73,125)"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif;color:rgb(31,73,125)">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.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif;color:rgb(31,73,125)"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif;color:rgb(31,73,125)">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.</span></p></div><div> </div></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Tue, Sep 8, 2020 at 8:51 PM Keith Henson via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">The 10-day Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota in August, which<br>
drew more than 400,000 people, has now been linked to more than<br>
250,000 coronavirus cases, according to a study by the IZA Institute<br>
of Labor Economics. The event will cost an estimated $12.2 billion<br>
in health-care costs, they wrote.<br>
<br>
<a href="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" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">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</a><br>
<br>
Keith<br><br>
</blockquote></div></div>