Sturgis

You have to give Team Apocalypse credit for their dogged attempt to sew fear, uncertainty, and doubt throughout the populace. The Team is populated almost exclusively by progressives, Democrat politicians, select public health "experts," and of course, a dishonest and willfully ignorant media. 

Virus-related hospitalizations and deaths are dropping like a stone and the public is tiring of the Team's ridiculous emphasis on "cases"—you know, positive tests for COVID-19 that are: (1) notoriously inaccurate, (2) tend to over-test, indicating that a person has the virus when in fact, they have dead remnants of the virus, and (3) the majority of these "cases" have zero symptoms—the person wouldn't even know they had the virus. Oh yeah, the evidence that an asymptomatic person can pass on a virulent strain of COVID-19 is sketchy, at best. Finally, the team is worried about mass pushback on ridiculous mask mandates that require masks in the outside air—an idiotic requirement that has NO basis in science and has been pushed by none other than Joe Biden.

But Team Apocalypse slogs onward in their attempt to keep the country locked down, keep schools closed, and defeat Donald Trump as a bonus for all of the upheaval. No matter that lives and livelihoods have been ruined, businesses have been destroyed, and children have been traumatized.

I know, I know, I've said all of this many times during the past 5 months, but it bears repeating. The Team is relentless, and their idiocy and dishonesty continues even as they are repeatedly proven wrong by real scientific and public health data.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal provide yet another example, writing:

Holy Hell’s Angels. Last month’s motorcycle rally among the deplorables in Sturgis, South Dakota, contributed to 266,796 Covid-19 cases and $12.2 billion in public-health costs—or so claims a new study widely flogged by the media. Here is another example of how flawed statistical models can generate grossly exaggerated projections.

The annual 10-day rally with live performances, races and bike shows drew 460,000 Americans from around the country to the small town of Sturgis (population: 7,000). South Dakota is among the few states that never imposed a shelter-in-place order or face-mask mandate. It has also let restaurants and bars operate without restrictions.

Many in the media and various health sages warned that the motorcycle rally represented a “worst case scenario” for a “super-spreading” event. It would be surprising if the rally didn’t lead to at least some new Covid cases. But it’s impossible to know how many because there’s no data on how many attendees or their close contacts later tested positive.

Never fear, the modelers as always are here. San Diego State University’s Center for Health Economics & Policy Studies sought to quantify the rally’s Covid impact in South Dakota and nationwide by analyzing the (anonymous) cell-phone data of attendees. They then compared case trends in counties with high, moderate and low numbers of attendees.

They found that cases increased by 3.6 to 3.9 per 1,000 in South Dakota in the three weeks after the rally, translating to between 3,185 and 3,441 more cases statewide. To put this number in perspective, New York state has recorded as many cases in the last week even with its stringent public-health rules.

It's worth mentioning that public health modelers have been notoriously inaccurate throughout the COVID-19 debacle—off in their projections by orders of magnitude. It's also rather suspicious that these egregious prediction errors always seem to fall on the catastrophist side of the ledger—a statistical anomaly that suggests there's something else at play here.

Yet, the Team (and its media flunkies) promote their projections as if they were handed down on the mount—without scientific evaluation or a healthy dose of deserved cynicism.

The WSJ dissects the results of the "study:"

Where the study jumps off the rails is linking all of the relative increase in virus cases in counties with attendees compared to those without rally participants. The modelers multiplied the percent increase in cases for counties with attendees by their pre-rally cumulative cases to get a total of 263,708 additional cases—266,796 including South Dakota’s increase.

But many “high inflow” counties like Los Angeles, Maricopa (Arizona), Clark (Nevada) and El Paso were experiencing flare-ups before the rally. These counties may have shared other characteristics like higher population density that contributed to their increases. There could be other “endogenous” variables—for instance, counties with more people who attended the motorcycle rally may also have had populations less observant of social distancing.

The study’s authors nonetheless assign each of these 266,796 Covid cases a public-health cost of $46,000—ergo $12.2 billion—though the vast majority of all virus cases are [asymptomatic,] mild or moderate. Talk about a case study in statistical overreach—and double standards.

Of course, low information citizens only saw the original headlines, so the Team yet again accomplished its goal—keep fear high and the country locked down.

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P.S. Odd that there haven't been any public heath "studies" and published papers and resultant media coverage of the findings on the impact of 100-plus days of protests and riots involving thousands of people on the streets of major U.S. cities. Odd ... indeed.