windwalker wrote:Ian C. Kuzushi wrote:
We have seen that religious gatherings have been super spreader events.
We have not seen this with protests (as explained in the post on the other Covid thread).
If they can not be questioned about being in a protest or riot how is the data
collected that would support this either way.
“No person will be asked proactively if they attended a protest,” Avery Cohen, a spokesperson for de Blasio, wrote in an emailed response to questions by THE CITY.
Instead, test-and-trace workers ask COVID-positive individuals general questions to help them “recall ‘contacts’ and individuals they may have exposed,” Cohen said. Among the initial questions: “Do you live with anyone in your home?”
Tracers then ask about “close contacts” — defined as being within six feet of another person for at least 10 minutes.
Given your ability to dig up completely obscure videos to support your point of view, I can only assume you are not reading the information posted which I again directed you to.
In Minneapolis, the cradle of the current movement, there have been testing sites stood up specifically for those who attended the protests.
Four sites run in partnership with the Mayo Clinic reported late last week that only 62 positive cases came out of 4,487 people tested, for a positivity rate of 1.4 percent, said Dave Verhasselt, a spokesperson for the Minnesota Department of Health. And on Tuesday, another Minnesota system called Health Partners reported a .99 percent positivity rate from the 8,500 it protesters tested.
Those figures are actually below the current statewide positivity rate which, per Verhasselt, is currently hovering around 3.6 to 3.7 percent. Hospitalizations have also continued their steady decline in the state.
New York City, which sometimes saw thousands of protesters demonstrating in multiple boroughs at once, is “not seeing an increase in cases associated with the demonstrations (as of yet),” Michael Lanza, NYC Health Department spokesperson, told TPM.
In particular, New York City Health Commissioner Oxiris Barbot said that her department has been closely tracking hospitalizations and emergency room visits, and has seen no spike since the protests began.
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The public health department in Seattle is telling the same story.
“We don’t have evidence that the rallies or protests are being associated with large numbers of cases currently,” Colette Cosner, department spokesperson, told TPM. “There is no one source of exposure that is jumping out at us from the data as a driver of cases.”
And in Washington D.C., which has been undulating with daily protests for weeks — memorialized most famously in pictures from the aggressive clearing of Lafayette Square for the President’s photo-op — the positivity rates are getting better, not worse.
“D.C. Health is still analyzing data to assess the impact of first amendment events in D.C., however we are continuing to see a downward trend in cases overall for the District,” D.C. Health spokeswoman Alison Reeves told TPM.
The same seems to be true in cities across the country.
The National Bureau of Economic Research produced a working paper on Monday after analyzing data from 315 cities that had protests.
“We find no evidence that net COVID-19 case growth differentially rose following the onset of Black Lives Matter protests, and even modest evidence of a small longer-run case growth decline,” the researchers concluded.