At this point roughly 9 million people  in the US have had covid 19.  It is easy enough to calculate that number.  All you need to do is look at the death rate in well controlled places like prisons and the death rate from countries that actually believe in science and have done meaningful amounts of testing and contact tracing and have controlled this disease very well.  It sure does help in dealing with any disease if you believe in science as you can keep it under very good control with either very short shutdowns or no shutdown other than whackos that fight the system.  What you learn if you look at world wide data is in an average population 1.2% die from it.  The US has reported about 110,000 deaths so divide by 1.2% and you get the % infected.  I know we all know the US is lying about the death rate and it is a higher then 110,000, but it is hard to know what the real number is.

If 9 million have been infected that is 3% of our population.  If you want to sample some sub population, such as bee keepers, you would need a rather large sample to spot any effect when only 3% of the population has had the disease.  For example if you sampled 100 the odds of zero cases would be 5%.  The odds of one case would be 15%.  The odds of two and three cases would be respectively 22% and 23%.  The odds of finding more than three cases would be 35%, all for the general population.  Obviously about the only way you could draw any meaningful conclusion from such a tiny sample as 100 would be if you happened to find something like ten cases.  Anything less would tell you nothing about that sub population.

Even a sample size of 1000 would be meaningless as you do not really know that 3% accurately enough.  It could easy be 4% or 5%.  Then you would also need to control for age.  Age is really important in covid 19 as it appears there may be some cross immunity from past corona virus cold infections mediated by T cells.  But sometime in your 50s or 60s your T cell immune system starts to fail and that immunity is lost permanently.  This is one reason that is suspected to be behind the poor outcomes in older people versus 30 or 40 year old people.  So, say you screened 10,000 bee keepers for covid 19 experience.  You need to correct that population for any age effects that differ from the general population.

Remember that this disease is no place close to uniform in incidence.  A number of states have had experiences far worse than the average for the US.  But, even within states it is not any place close to uniform.  Take NY as an example.  Eastern NY centered around NY City has been absolutely hammered.  Yet western NY has seen very few cases.  So, for your bee keeper population you also need to correct for where that bee keeper lives as this can have an over whelming effect.  Where do most bee keepers live?  In rural and semi rural areas that tend to be little impacted by covid 19.

Frankly I doubt very much if you identified every single bee keeper in the US and did a survey if you would have enough data to draw any meaningful conclusion as to does bee keeping protect or enhance this disease.  Even if you saw raw data that said bee keepers get the disease at 1/3 the rate of the general population I doubt if you could provide robust stats that would say this was a meaningful difference even if you corrected for age and geography.  How would you even start to control for different responses to stings?  After all, probably the large majority of bee keepers routinely suit up before working their bees to avoid being stung because they get significant reactions to stings.

In clinical trials of drugs routinely the test populations are greater than 5000.  Such trials routinely fail to show a statistically significant response to drugs which we know with 100% confidence produce good results for some people.  Such trials also routinely fail to show side effects which we learn about after FDA approval.  Those side effects cab turn out to be major life changing side effects for 1 or 2% of those who take the drug.  You generally do not really get a good handle on the pluses and minuses of a new drug until you have treated a few million people with it.

The whole idea of looking at a small group of bee keepers and trying to decide if covid effects them less or more than the general population is doomed to fail to produce meaningful results.  None the less, the advertising people could easy take such data, if favorable, and turn it into a money machine by selling supplements that are claimed to give the same benefits as you get from actually keeping bees.  They just need to avoid breaking laws by making actual health claims.  That is the basis of those large shelves of supplements in every drug store that do nothing besides thinning your wallet.

Dick

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