Media Claim ‘Trump Rally’ Led to Tulsa Coronavirus Surge; Ignore Sharpton Rally, BLM Protests

[mystery-ak]

Joel B. Pollak 8 Jul 2020

The media are claiming that public health officials blamed President Donald Trump’s campaign rally last month in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for a local surge in coronavirus cases — even though they never did so, and there were other large public events.

The Associated Press ran the headline: “Health official: Trump rally ‘likely’ source of virus surge.”

But the story itself notes that Tulsa City-County Health Department Director Dr. Bruce Dart said that there were “several large events,” and never explicitly singled out the Trump rally:

    Tulsa County reported 261 confirmed new cases on Monday, a one-day record high, and another 206 cases on Tuesday.

    Although the health department’s policy is to not publicly identify individual settings where people may have contracted the virus, Dart said those large gatherings “more than likely” contributed to the spike.

    “In the past few days, we’ve seen almost 500 new cases, and we had several large events just over two weeks ago, so I guess we just connect the dots,” Dart said.

The video of the press conference confirms that Dart stopped short of blaming the Trump rally explicitly.

In addition to Black Lives Matter protests outside the Trump rally, there were also protests earlier in the month.

And there was also a large rally for Juneteenth the day before the Trump rally, headlined by Al Sharpton — a fact that the AP story fails to mention.

more
https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2020/07/08/media-claim-trump-rally-led-to-tulsa-coronavirus-surge-ignore-sharpton-rally-blm-protests/

[PeteS in CA]

About 1/4 of the way down this page, https://www.tulsa-health.org/COVID19 , is a chart of "Daily Cases and Deaths". If you hover your mouse over the cases line data points you'll see the date and number of new cases. Doing that, several things can be noted:

* There was a significant fairly steady upturn in cases in the 12 days before Trump's 6/20 rally;

* There is a major spike in new cases on 6/23, too early for Trump's rally to have "contributed" to the spike;

* There is a second spike on 7/6, which may be a bit late for Trump's rally to have "contributed" to the spike;

* Both spikes are Tuesdays, and in both the two days before are significant valleys; thus the spikes are largely (but not entirely) artifacts of lulls/lags in testing and results reporting.

Putting it together, new cases had been increasing significantly for two weeks prior to Trump's rally. The 6/23 spike on the chart was not due to Trump's rally. The second spike probably has some new cases from the time period of the Sharp Al's and Trump's rallies, but probably most of that spike is from events/causes other than those two rallies. Looking at the pink line - just the last few days are relevant at this point, given how the infection progresses - there has been no increase in deaths.