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Study: Trump rallies may be responsible for an estimated 700 Covid-19 deaths

The president is most likely a superspreader.
By Ian Millhiser Oct 31, 2020, 12:00pm EDT


A study conducted by four Stanford University economic researchers determined that 18 Trump campaign rallies, the bulk of which took place over the past summer, “ultimately resulted in more than 30,000 incremental confirmed cases of COVID-19” and “likely led to more than 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.

“For the vast majority of county matching procedures we employ,” the authors wrote, “our estimate of the average treatment effect across the eighteen rallies implies that they increased subsequent confirmed cases of COVID-19 by more than 250 per 100,000 residents.” The researchers — B. Douglas Bernheim, an economics professor at Stanford, and Stanford grad students Nina Buchmann, Zach Freitas-Groff, and Sebastián Otero — extrapolated that figure to the entire sample, concluding that the rallies led to thousands of new infections and, likely, hundreds of deaths.

As the authors acknowledge, trying to identify exactly how many infections
https://www.vox.com/2020/10/31/21543277/trump-rallies-covid-19-deaths-superspreader-stanford-study-infections