As the COVID-19 pandemic stretches on with very little relief in sight, the decisions we all make can get a little fuzzy. Some of us might allow a playdate outside to get maskless at points, or allow kids to get closer than they should be. It isn’t a good thing. It isn’t a smart thing. But there are aspects to the public health crisis that are mental, and we all try and deal with those things as best as we can. However, driving a motorcycle to hang out in close proximity to 250,000 other people for a 10-day party/festival is straight up dangerous and ignorant.
The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota, which took place the first week of August, worried health professions around the world as hundreds of thousands of attendees from all different parts of the country went maskless, drank, and reveled—and guess what? Wearing T-shirts that read “Screw COVID. I went to Sturgis” didn’t stop them from spreading COVID-19 is a massive way. A new study entitled “The Contagion Externality of a Superspreading Event: The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally and COVID-19,” by the IZA Institute of Labor Economics found that the 10-day event can be tied to 250,000 coronavirus cases.
According to the study, which used anonymized cellphone data from the rally where around 500,000 people congregated, there were a “total number of cases to 266,796 or 19 percent of 1.4 million new cases of COVID-19 in the United States between August 2nd 2020 and September 2nd 2020,” connected to the rally. IZA estimates that the costs of this event to the public will be over $12 billion. It is important to note that to reach this number, researchers worked under the conservative assumption that all of these new cases were nonfatal. The researchers explain that the conservative nonfatal modeling is in order to give a general ballpark figure for public officials to work with. We already know that people have died as a direct result of COVID-19 exposure at the Sturgis rally.
Researchers also pointed out that the states and localities where some of the spreaders from the rally returned were able to mitigate the spread locally. But those examples were solely in places actually implementing public safety measures like masks, social distancing, and early testing and quarantining. Republican Gov. Kristi Noem, a Trump death cult member, promoted how everything was “back to normal” in South Dakota, welcoming the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally to her state and helping spread death across the country.
