Saturday, October 31, 2020

The Trump Death Tour By The Numbers

A study by Stanford University estimates that malignant narcissist and intentional COVID-19 spreader Donald "COVID Donnie" Trump's rallies to stroke his damaged ego has caused an estimated 30,000 new COVID-19 cases and a corresponding 700 deaths:

"The study examined 18 counties that hosted Trump rallies in locations such as Tulsa, Oklahoma; Phoenix, Arizona; and Winston-Salem, North Carolina, held between June 20 and September 22. It then compared the rate of post-rally Covid-19 infections in the host counties to that of comparable counties that did not host a rally. Attendance at individual rallies varied, but Trump often draws thousands of supporters to these events."

The study notes that the deaths aren't entirely among those that attended his public health-violating Nuremberg rallies, but are also reflected in the people they came in contact with later -- family, friends, the general public in their communities. Also note that the time period involved was from June 20 to September 22, the latter date being just as COVID infections and deaths began to rise to their current record numbers. Trump has held multiple rallies in the weeks since September 22, so the figures presented by the Stanford University study have undoubtedly been far exceeded.

A study by CNN also found that in counties that Trump had held rallies in between August 17 and September 26, 82% of the counties had increases in COVID infections. His September 12 rally in Minden, NV was followed by a 225% increase in new COVID cases in the weeks that followed.

Not only does this malignant narcissist not care about his cult followers, he's actively, demonstrably causing their infection by a deadly virus, which public health experts have been saying all along.

1 comment:

rjnerd said...

Unfortunately while the effect is likely true, the numbers will be wrong, as the methodology was wrong. Like the Sturgis paper, this is done by economists, without consulting an epidemiologist. While I don’t have one in house any more (cancer, wife, May), I emailed one of her classmates, who is now a professor of public health.

She is a Biden voting German born naturalized US citizen, that might just drag hubby and the kids back to Germany if Trump manages to steal the election.

Here is the meat of her comments:

3. We are convinced that his events are spreading COVID-19 and we’ll find a way to prove it
4. The epi studies out there don’t seem to show much of an effect of the Trump events; therefore, we claim that we’ve come up with a different approach that the entire field of epidemiology has never thought of (not that we checked...because if we had checked we would have discovered that our approach has been used in epi studies forever except that epi studies - unlike us - tend to use it correctly). We also make the basic assumption that a degree in epidemiology is unnecessary to conduct an epi study. Anybody can do it.
5. We are unaware of, ignore or explain away most major problems with our approach.
6. We hide the remaining major flaws behind various pseudo-statistical smokescreens.
7. As long as we haven’t found what we set out to find, we keep making adjustments to our approach.
8. We repeat steps 5-7 until we’re happy with the results.
9. Voila! We have shown scientifically that Trump is a jerk!

Not that I disagree with their sentiments about Trump, but this is no way to conduct a scientific study. These authors give science and scientists a bad name.