Interesting Stories: Sturgis rally, Japan Olympics, and Cullman, AL rally

So, a couple of interesting charts came up in regards to the coronavirus. The news are still relentlessly bad and combined with the onslaught of extreme weather, I just sort of pulled back on posting on these two topics. I’m not ignoring them – I’m still doing my nightly corona collection but the trends have been the same from week to week: the south undergoing a surge that is greater than last summer and approaching the levels of this past winter. It sounds like the hospitals might approach the point of rationed care which means doctors have to try to save those who have a better chance of being saved and ignore the others.

Does that mean the unvaccinated will be last because the odds of them being saved is terrible? I don’t know.

Anyway, the first interesting set of charts pertains to the Sturgis rally which took place 8/6 to 8/15/2021 this year. The first chart on the left shows bar trends since June and it is remarkable the rise in cases since the rally denoted in pink.

The second chart on the left shows the trends since inception of CDC’s data gathering so you can see last year’s Sturgis rally and then the rise in cases afterward. This year, the rise is much more steeper which means the infection rate happens quicker. What I don’t know is if the infection cases will be greater than what transpired in January 2021.

Image 1: Sturgis Rally – cases surge after the rally

The next curiosity is the surges happening after the Japan Olympics.

So cases began to rise during the Olympics and continued afterward. You could almost say the cases began to rise just before the Olympics began. Was that during a period when the athletes started to arrive in the area? And then afterward, everybody went back to their home countries, possibly bringing back the virus.

The last one is the rally in Cullman, Alabama. Now, it looks like the cases were surging before the rally because that rally was a one day affair, unlike the other aforementioned stories (Sturgis and Japan). In this instance, people going to the Cullman rally were going to bring back home the virus since Cullman was already in the throes of a raging infection circulation. The red arrow is pointing to the pink bar representing the day of the rally, so you can see that Cullman was already undergoing a surge.

Image 4: Rally at Cullman, Alabama

To end this post, I will say that it looks like a lot of us are not handling the pandemic very well: there are lots of stories about parents protesting the mask and vaccine mandates with violence beginning to bust out. I can understand the questions about the safety of the vaccine and so would need time to evaluate the safety, although we’ve been vaccinating it for roughly 8 months. But the hesitation is getting harder and harder to understand as time goes on. The opposition to masking because it interferes with their freedom is definitely hard to understand.

Their judgement and thinking process has gone haywire so they prefer their “freedom” over taking safety precautions. It feels like they can’t take the idea that we are undergoing a pandemic: that is too frightening to register as happening. (I would say the same thing about the extreme weather occurrences and climate deniers: the fear of what the climate change means is so great that they would rather deny the existence – and believe me, I get that – the increasing frequency of these extreme weather is a frightening prospect.) When growing up, I would read a few science fiction/action stories that talked about the Spanish of 1918 as a horrifying event that genetic copies of the flu had to remain buried/ remain in a vault never to see daylight (I’m talking about fiction now – not historical retelling). And now we are living through such a horrifying event that once populated stories.

So people are starting to act aggressive and resort to violence to get their way (no mask mandates, no vaccination mandates, no social distancing). They want the world to return to what is was before the pandemic, but no, that is not going to happen.

They lack grit, resilience and EQ to survive this without descending into some kind of war. How do we instill such traits? Because we are going to need them for climate change and for the automation that is going to sweep across the world. The changes will be so immense that I worry they won’t be able to survive what’s coming. The pandemic is just a small portion of the onslaught of changes.