If you wanted to design a mechanism for spreading an infectious disease quickly, you'd be hard-pressed to do better than the method anti-stay-at-home activists have chosen. A new study of anonymized phone data shows that the people who have been attending highly visible rallies against state shelter-in-place orders in places like Michigan, Colorado, and Florida have been traveling long distances to get to their ‘We don't need masks!’ get-togethers.
Some of them, in fact, are even coming in from other states. It's the perfect, worst-case scenario: A group of people self-selected for being aggressively resistant to basic pandemic protections has been gathering together, commingling for a few hours, and then dispersing across a wide area with whatever hitchhiking viruses someone else may have brought in.
The Guardian wrote up the major findings, as provided to them via the Committee to Protect Medicare and VoteMap. Anonymized cellphone data was used to identify devices present at anti-lockdown rallies in five states, and track where the phones moved after those rallies. (Yes, this is a thing now. Yes, it's both very useful and rather alarming.)
The now-infamous rally in Lansing, Michigan, for example, was a promiscuous affair: Cell phones from that armed, storm-the-capitol shoutfest dispersed to "all parts" of Michigan, while others crossed into Indiana. It wasn't local Lansing residents doing the protesting, in other words, but dedicated gun-toters from a good ways off. An April protest in Denver saw participants (or at least their cell phones) head back to locations in "Wyoming, Nebraska, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Utah." Florida protesters were trailed back to Georgia, and so forth.
What this might mean is, of course, obvious. Again, the anti-lockdown protesters are the people in the United States most devoted to the theory that no urgent action is required to combat a worldwide pandemic, and "social distancing" of the type urged by pandemic experts is especially not needed. That is their thing; they are very, very animated over it.
Collect a group of the Americans most hostile to basic pandemic precautions, put them in each other's faces for a few hours, and send them back out to their own communities and surrounding states and you've got a near-perfect mechanism for spreading the pandemic. You could only improve it by demanding they all lick each other before going home.
On the perhaps-bright side, you could argue that the protesters, by definition, are mostly individuals who have had no direct experience with the virus; those would be the sort of people who would be most comfortable in imagining that the pandemic that so easily spread throughout the world could never possibly eat their own faces spread to their own communities. This is not completely true, however. There's been at least one case of a protest organizer testing positive for the virus, only to sally forth after quarantine and continue to champion the cause.
We have the bad news, then, in that very example. Asymptomatic carriers can still spread the virus, and the odds that the people most cavalier about safety precautions are truly the most disease-free among us are ... not good.
The short version, as seems always to be the case, is that we're boned. A thousand self-isolating Americans can be nullified in their efforts by just one idiot, and America has more idiots than it does songbirds, at this point. We now have story after story of new infections caused by specific gatherings—for example, church services—of people absolutely convinced they were not in danger because Reasons, only to find out that they were extremely wrong. It will cause the shelter-in-place orders to be needed longer than they otherwise would be, and will kill more people than otherwise would have died.
But if you really wanted to spread the virus around as easily as possible, you couldn't do much better than gun-toting idiots traveling across state lines to meet and collectively bellow about how pandemic hygiene measures are an affront to their gun-toting ways. That'd do it, all right. If you've got one of those people in your own life, maybe ... maybe just stay away from them for a while.