A new Stanford University study estimates that 18 of President Donald Trump’s recent rallies have led to 30,000 COVID cases and 700 deaths.
We should also mention that Friday marked the highest ever one day toll of new COVID-19 cases in the U.S. with 98,583 new infections reported as well as 978 deaths.
The analysis looked at each county where Trump held rallies between June 20 and September 30 2020. Researchers compared “post-event outcomes and pre-event characteristics” of counties of similar size elsewhere in the country. They did this to determine the differences between COVID cases and deaths in counties where Trump held rallies and those in similarly sized counties where he didn’t.
“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,” the study states. “We conclude that the rallies likely led to more than 700 deaths (not necessarily among attendees).”
Three weeks before this study was released, Minnesota health officials announced that nine attendees of Trump’s September 18 rally in Bemidji had tested positive for COVID-19. Trump regularly flouts municipal ordinances requiring masks and social distancing at his events by calling his rallies “peaceful protests.”
Trump downplayed the pandemic’s lethality in its early stages, has recently said that the U.S. is “rounding the corner” in the pandemic, and a Tuesday White House press release created his administration with “ending the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Trump says COVID-19 is less deadly than the flu, but statistics from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show that’s total bunk. In less than a year, COVID-19 has killed more people in America than the military conflicts in Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan and World War I combined. Flu killed 34,200 Americans in 2019. COVID-19 has killed over 230,000 Americans in less than a year.
Trump has also publicly advocated for herd immunity, an approach the World Health Organization has called “very dangerous.”