Your questions, answered“Have they traced new cases from the people who attended Trump's rallies in the last weeks of his reelection campaign?” —Karen in Hawaii No, nor have they traced many cases to the rallies President Trump held earlier in the year. This is in large part because “they” refers to a jumble of disparate and often under-funded state and local health agencies which, for lack of a coordinated national program, have been left in charge of nearly all contact tracing in the United States. And which consequently aren't doing much effective contact tracing at all. Even so, there is evidence that Trump’s crowded, largely maskless, occasionally health-code-breaking campaign events contributed to covid-19 outbreaks throughout the summer and fall — and there's no reason to think the president's final string of rallies was any less contagious. Reuters reported that public health officials in Minnesota have linked four outbreaks, including at least two dozen infections, to Trump rallies held in September and October. Some people known to have attended rallies in Michigan and Wisconsin later tested positive for the coronavirus, according to Reuters. The Charlotte Observer reported that two people contracted the virus after attending Trump's rally at an airport in Gastonia, N.C., in late October, although there's no evidence they caught it at the event. “The problem is we’ve not done anything to get real numbers,” Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, told Reuters. Like many other health experts, he suspects the rallies’ true damage has not been measured. The week before Election Day, a small group of Stanford University researchers published their attempt to get around the problem. Their paper, which has not been peer-reviewed, analyzed 18 communities that hosted Trump rallies between June and September — from Yuma, Ariz., to Pittsburgh. The researchers looked at publicly reported infection rates in these communities immediately after the rallies, and compared them to similar communities where no rally had been held. Using statistical analysis, they estimated that Trump's 18 rallies led to 30,000 new coronavirus cases and 700 deaths. Their findings were particularly striking for two Wisconsin counties, Winnebago and Marathon, which both reported dramatic spikes in new cases a few days after their respective rallies. After determining that the spikes could not be artifacts of increased testing, the Stanford team concluded that “the communities in which Trump rallies took place paid a high price in terms of disease and death.” We should note that the White House is currently experiencing its second covid-19 outbreak since Trump and many of his associates fell ill last month. The president's chief of staff Mark Meadows, HUD secretary Ben Carson and several other aides are now in self-quarantine after attending an election night party that, while not a rally, was similarly lax about masks and social distancing. | 
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