Stanford study links 700 Covid deaths to Trump rallies

In an October 31 breaking news story in Progreso Weekly, I wrote about how this administration consciously and deliberately deceived the American people about COVID-19 and continues to do so with tragic consequences.

“The tragedy is that there are still plenty of people who believe the president and risk death by showing up at his super-spreader rallies. Holding them shows the president’s criminality. Attending them demonstrates the cavalier imbecility of his most fanatical supporters.”

Hard words that are amply supported by a Stanford University study published Friday, October 30. The major conclusion: “President Donald Trump’s massive campaign rallies led to more than 30,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases and likely caused the deaths of 700 Americans.”

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Abstract  from the Stanford University study

We investigated the effects of large group meetings on the spread of COVID-19 by studying the impact of eighteen Trump campaign rallies. To capture the effects of subsequent contagion within the pertinent communities, our analysis encompasses up to ten post-rally weeks for each event. Our method is based on a collection of regression models, one for each event, that capture the relationships between post-event outcomes and pre-event characteristics, including demographics and the trajectory of COVID-19 cases, in similar counties. We explore a total of 24 procedures for identifying sets of matched counties. For the vast majority of these variants, our estimate of the average treatment effect across the eighteen events implies that they increased subsequent confirmed cases of COVID-19 by more than 250 per 100,000 residents. Extrapolating this figure to the entire sample, we conclude that these eighteen rallies ultimately resulted in more than 30,000 incremental confirmed cases of COVID-19. Applying county-specific post-event death rates, we conclude that the rallies likely led to more than 700 deaths (not necessarily among attendees).