Modern journalism — high school reporters could do a better job
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Lucas Manfredi. “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old … They literally know nothing.” Ben Rhodes
Over at Fox News, 27-year-old Lucas Manfredi reports on a motorcycle rally at Daytona Beach that’s expected to draw 300,000 visitors.
Here’s what passes for journalism these days:
While the event will continue as planned, city officials are hoping to avoid a coronavirus outbreak similar to an incident which occurred at a Sturgis, South Dakota motorcycle rally in August.
About 19 percent of 1.4 million new coronavirus cases in the U.S. between Aug. 2 and Sept. 2 were linked back to the motorcycle event, according to according to researchers from San Diego State University's Center for Health Economics & Policy Studies. That's more than 266,000 coronavirus cases attributed to the 10-day event, which more than 460,000 people attended despite fears it could become a so-called super-spreader event.
"We conclude that the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally generated public health costs of approximately $12.2 billion," the researchers wrote in a paper. "This is enough to have paid each of the estimated 462,182 rally attendees $26,553.64 not to attend."
Scary stuff, if true, but is it? Nope, it’s pure, unadulterated bullshit, a bogus study with completely unsupported claims and conclusions that were picked up by our porn press and repeated as fact. (Tellingly, the link Manfredi provides to “the study” he’s pretending to report on actually leads back to another Fox article from August that makes the same false claims; echo chamber for idiots)
Even Sopes labels this claim as “unproven” – which is unduly gentle, and points out that both epidemiologists and statisticians scoffed at its entirely hypothetical conclusion.
Before we get to the expert opinions on this study, let’s dispel a few quick rumors on social media. This study did not claim, for instance, that 250,000 people tested positive for COVID-19 shortly after attending the rally. The research attempted to quantify how many cases of COVID-19 could potentially be linked to people who attended the rally, traveled to other locations, and then spread the disease among their communities.
It should also be noted that this is an estimate based on a wide variety of factors, not an actual headcount of COVID-19 patients who attended, or knew someone who attended, the rally. As mentioned above, this study was not peer-reviewed and was prefaced with a piece of text noting that “IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion.”
While this study may provide a broad estimate on how Sturgis could have impacted the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of epidemiologists and statisticians have taken issue with models used in the study and the report’s findings.
Jennifer Beam Dowd, the deputy director of the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science at the University of Oxford, also took issue with the paper’s conclusion in an article published on Slate. Generally speaking, Dowd argued that the researchers made assumptions that don’t always play out in reality. More specifically, Dowd took issue with how the study confidently presented a precise conclusion (266,796 COVID-cases) despite noisy results.
The 266,796 number also overstates the precision of the estimates in the paper even if the model is taken at face value. The confidence intervals for the “high inflow” counties seem to include zero (meaning the authors can’t say with statistical confidence that there was any difference in infections across counties due to the rally). No standard errors (measures of the variability around the estimate) are provided for the main regression results, and many of the p-values for key results are not statistically significant at conventional levels. So even if one believes the design and assumptions, the results are very “noisy” and subject to caveats that don’t merit the broadcasting of the highly specific 266,796 figure with confidence, though I imagine that “somewhere between zero and 450,000 infections” would not have been as headline-grabbing.
The claim that 250,000 COVID-19 cases were linked to Sturgis is based on one study’s estimate of how the motorcycle rally could have impacted the pandemic. As several statisticians and epidemiologists have noted, the models used for this study contained flaws, and the report arrived at a conclusion that was more precise than the available data would have allowed.
If you’re not bored by all this by now, here’s a bit more:
The only study I can find that actually tracked individual attendees was one conducted by the CDC of Minnesota residents Its conclusion: 86 contracted COVID, either directly, or secondarily.
Eighty-six Minnesota COVID-19 cases were associated with the South Dakota motorcycle rally; approximately one third of counties in Minnesota reported at least one case epidemiologically linked to this event,” said the study called COVID-19 Outbreak Associated with a 10-Day Motorcycle Rally in a Neighboring State — Minnesota, August–September 2020.
Cases were identified in people who worked at the rally and attended the rally and then, spread COVID-19 to others.
The numbers linked to the Sturgis Rally may seem small compared to the 461,000 attendees and the number of COVID-19 cases in Minnesota 249,906 as of Nov. 20, but the findings show how one large event can spread the virus, according to the CDC.
But this is our news coverage: a false claim, reported by one outlet as fact and then repeated endlessly, ricocheting around the fake news world until “everybody knows” that it’s true. Manfredi is not the only reporter out there who’s too lazy and too incurious to check his sources; in fact, he’s the very model of the incompetent modern journalist of today.
