iNDICA NEWS BUREAU-
While the Biden campaigns has been restricted to mainly digital campaigning due to COVID-19, in the world of Trump campaigns, the disease doesn’t exist.
No masks, absolutely no sense of social distancing and a whole lot of screaming and falling on each other. This is the reality in Trump’s rallies.
A new study by Stanford University researchers released on Friday Oct 31, stressed that the communities where the Trump rallies took place “paid a high price in terms of disease and death.”
In the study titled “The Effects of Large Group Meetings on the Spread of COVID-19: The Case of Trump Rallies”, researchers concluded 18 rallies by Trump held between June 20 and September 22 “ultimately resulted in more than 30,000 incremental confirmed cases of COVID-19” and “likely led to more than 700 deaths”, which may not necessarily have been among attendees.
“Our analysis strongly supports the warnings and recommendations of public health officials concerning the risk of COVID-19 transmission at large group gatherings, particularly when the degree of compliance with guidelines concerning the use of masks and social distancing is low. The communities in which Trump rallies took place paid a high price in terms of disease and death,” the researchers said in the study.
Reacting to a Twitter post on the study, Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden said “President Trump doesn’t care about you. He doesn’t even care about his own supporters.”
The CDC has specifically warned not to gather in large groups or hold in-person events, particularly in settings where participants do not wear masks or practice social distancing, pose a substantial risk of further contagion. But Trump does not like rules or restrictions.
Researchers said the purpose of the study is to shed light on these issues by studying the impact of election rallies held by Trump’s campaign between June 20 and September 30.
The researchers said Trump rallies have several “distinguishing features” that lend themselves to this inquiry, adding that attendees at Trump rallies numbered in the thousands and sometimes in the tens of thousands.
They noted that the rallies were not geographically ubiquitous and the degree of compliance with guidelines concerning the use of masks and social distancing was low “in part because the Trump campaign downplayed the risk of infection. This feature heightens the risk that a rally could become a “superspreader event.”
The researchers said that to capture the effects of subsequent contagion within the pertinent communities, their analysis encompasses up to 10 post-rally weeks for each event.
