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A study by four Stanford University economics researchers determined that 18 Trump campaign rallies, most of which took place over the past summer, “ultimately resulted in more than 30,000 additional confirmed cases of COVID- 19 “and” probably led to over 700 deaths. “
The study looked at 18 counties that hosted Trump rallies in places such as Tulsa, Oklahoma; Phoenix, Arizona; and Winston-Salem, North Carolina, held between June 20 and September 22. He then compared the rate of Covid-19 infections after the rally in host counties to that of comparable counties that did not host a rally. Attendance at individual gatherings varied, but Trump often attracts thousands of supporters to these events.
“For the vast majority of the county-matching procedures that we use,” the authors wrote, “our estimate of the average treatment effect on the eighteen gatherings implies that they increased confirmed cases of COVID- 19 more than 250 per 100,000 inhabitants. ” The researchers – B. Douglas Bernheim, professor of economics at Stanford, and Stanford graduate students Nina Buchmann, Zach Freitas-Groff and Sebastián Otero – extrapolated this figure to the entire sample, concluding that the gatherings had leads to thousands of new infections and, possibly, hundreds of deaths.
As the authors acknowledge, trying to pinpoint exactly how many infections resulted from a Trump rally (or any other potential super-spread event) is not easy. Factors such as whether the rally is taking place indoors or outdoors, whether a large number of infected people attended, whether participants were wearing masks, and “the distribution of infected people among the rally participants” can all lead to very different infection rates.
Likewise, while the authors estimate that Trump’s summer rallies led to more than 700 deaths, they note that those deaths are not necessarily among the attendees. For example, a rally may be infected with a mild case, but that same rally could give the virus to his wife, who gives it to a colleague, who gives it to his sister, who dies of Covid-19.
Nonetheless, the average discrepancies between the number of infections in counties hosting Trump rallies and infection rates in other similar counties suggest that at least some of the events of Trump’s campaign were widespread events, potentially. responsible for hundreds of lives lost.
Earlier this month, Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warned that Trump was “asking for trouble” by organizing mass political rallies as the number of Covid infections -19 was increasing. But Fauci’s warning does not appear to have deterred the president, who plans to hold 14 rallies in the last three days of the 2020 campaign.
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