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This post is a container for my short-form writing. See this post for meta-level discussion about shortform.
Despite the justness of their cause, the protests are bad. They will kill at least thousands, possibly as many as hundreds of thousands, through COVID-19 spread. Many more will be crippled. The deaths will be disproportionately among dark-skinned people, because of the association between disease severity and vitamin D deficiency.
Up to this point, R was about 1; not good enough to win, but good enough that one more upgrade in public health strategy would do it. I wasn't optimistic, but I held out hope that my home city, Berkeley, might become a green zone.
Masks help, and being outdoors helps. They do not help nearly enough.
George Floyd was murdered on May 25. Most protesters protest on weekends; the first weekend after that was May 30-31. Due to ~5-day incubation plus reporting delays, we don't yet know how many were infected during that first weekend of protests; we'll get that number over the next 72 hours or so.
We are now in the second weekend of protests, meaning that anyone who got infected at the first protest is now close to peak infectivity. People who protested last weekend will be superspreaders this weekend; the jump in cases we see over the next 72 hours will be about *the square root* of the number of cases that the protests will generate.
Here's the COVID-19 case count dashboard for Alameda County and for Berkeley. I predict a 72 hours from now, Berkeley's case-count will be 170 (50% CI 125-200; 90% CI 115-500).
This post is a container for my short-form writing. See this post for meta-level discussion about shortform.