Internet Scofflaw

When the George Floyd demonstrations began, there was a lot of justified concern that they would act as super-spreader events and set back the progress we have made against covid. (One couldn’t help but notice that the same people who been highly critical of public gatherings just days before were fine with gatherings in what they deemed to be a good cause.) This paper argues that, against all expectation, the demonstrations actually slowed the spread of covid.

The paper has met with some skepticism, but the methodology seems reasonable to me. I think it’s very plausible. However, its results are widely misunderstood, and to some degree it is the authors’ fault.

The paper explicitly acknowledges that they did not even attempt to look at whether covid spread at the demonstrations. Instead, the paper looks at cell-phone data to determine whether, on balance, the public overall congregated more during them. (ASIDE: The paper also looks a little at growth in covid cases, and that part is less convincing.) They found that the general public was so scared of the violence at these riots that they stayed home, and that effect outweighed the effect of the demonstrations themselves.

This makes sense. As large as the riots were, the vast majority of people did not participate, so even a modest negative effect among the majority could outweigh the riots themselves.

This is being spun as a defense of the demonstrations. Partly, that is the fault of the authors who asserted in their conclusion that “public speech and public health did not trade off against each other in this case.” This is a bizarre take.

Yes, public speech and public health may have coexisted, but the price of their coexistence was burning cities, many deaths, immeasurable property damage, and countless ruined lives. This is not a positive result.

The paper compounds the problem by failing to look at the key question: what happened when the riots settled down but the protests continued? At that point we would expect the negative effect to fade and the positive effect to dominate. Alas, the paper does not look at that question, so we don’t have the cell-phone data, but we can look at public data on covid spread.

According to the notes I took at the time, there was relative peace in the cities starting June 2. We expect a week’s incubation time between exposure and symptoms, so we would expect to see a surge in covid cases starting June 9. And, if we look at the data, that is exactly what we see.

To summarize, the burning of our cities masked the anticipated effect of the demonstrations on covid, but the anticipated rise happened as soon as the demonstrations became peaceful.

(Via Daily Wire.)