18 Trump Rallies May Have Resulted in 30,000 COVID Cases: Study

File image of US President Donald Trump.

(Photo Courtesy: AP via PTI)

According to a new study by researchers from Stanford University, about 18 election rallies by US President Donald Trump are estimated to have led to more than 30,000 confirmed cases of novel coronavirus and more than 700 deaths, NDTV reported.

The study emphasised the fact that the communities where the Trump rallies took place "paid a high price in terms of disease and death."

Titled as ‘The Effects of Large Group Meetings on the Spread of COVID-19: The Case of Trump Rallies’, the research focused on18 rallies held by Donald Trump between 20 June and 22 September and found that they resulted in “more than 30,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19” and “likely led to more than 700 deaths.”

“There is reason to fear that such gatherings can serve as superspreader events', severely undermining efforts to control the pandemic,” the study observed. The researchers also stated that they specifically chose Trump rallies for this study because the attendees at his rallies numbered in the thousands and sometimes in the tens of thousands.

The researchers further added that the degree of compliance with guidelines concerning the use of masks and social distancing measures was low in part because the Trump campaign downplayed the risk of infection.

“Our method is based on a collection of regression models, one for each event, that capture the relationships between post-event outcomes and pre-event characteristics, including demographics and the trajectory of COVID-19 cases, in similar counties,” the NDTV report quoted the researchers as saying.

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden also shared the study on Twitter saying, “President Trump doesn’t care about you. He doesn’t even care about his own supporters.”