REALLY? New BS Study Claims Black Lives Matter Riots Slowed Overall Spread of Coronavirus

George Floyd riots in Los Angeles

A new study claims that the Black Lives Matter riots actually may have slowed the overall spread of the Coronavirus.

Hundreds of thousands of people gathered in the streets rioting, looting and protesting without social distancing.

However, the study claims that the riots actually slowed the spread of COVID because the violent riots caused many more people to stay home.

Maybe because law-abiding citizens were obeying lockdown orders and choosing not to destroy their own cities?

The National Bureau of Economic Research published this so-called ‘study’ authored by Dhaval M. Dave, Andrew I. Friedson, Kyutaro Matsuzawa, Joseph J. Sabia and Samuel Safford, before it was peer-reviewed.

Via The Colorado Sun:

But a new study by a nationwide research team that includes a University of Colorado Denver professor has found something surprising: The protests may have slowed the overall spread of the coronavirus in cities with large demonstrations, including Denver.

“We think that what’s going on is it’s the people who are not going to protest are staying away,” said Andrew Friedson, the CU-Denver professor who is one of the paper’s co-authors. “The overall effect for the entire city is more social distancing because people are avoiding the protests.”

Friedson said his paper doesn’t try to figure out whether the protests spread the virus among the people at the protest. Instead, he said the research took the bigger-picture view: What did the protests mean for overall transmission of the virus within the entire community?

The study looked at 315 American cities with populations of more than 100,000 and found that 281 of those cities saw protests. The remaining 34 cities that did not see protests — which, at the time, included Aurora — were used as a control group against which to measure the impact of the protests.

“Public speech and public health did not trade off against each other in this case,” the authors wrote in the paper.

The authors of this bs study cautioned against outdoor activity such as weddings, arguing that weddings are more dangerous than rioting and looting.

‘An outdoor wedding doesn’t generate avoidance behavior; we’re measuring avoidance behavior,” Friedson said. “People don’t say, ‘Oh man, there’s an outdoor wedding next door, we should stay home.’”

Got that?

Weddings, barbecues and parties will cause COVID to spread — but rioting, looting and protesting (if you are in solidarity with Black Lives Matter) will actually slow the spread of COVID.