“Despite delta, Sturgis Motorcycle Rally poised to ride again” (ABC):
South Dakota’s Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, which begins Friday and runs through Aug. 15, is expected to draw upwards of 700,000 attendees. Last year’s rally, which took place during the height of the United States’ summer surge, had more than 400,000 estimated attendees, many of whom didn’t wear masks as they patronized bars, restaurants and concerts.
The downstream effect was tangible: At least 649 COVID-19 cases were linked to Sturgis, including secondary and third-degree contacts.
Republican Gov. Kristi Noem supports the rally, a major economic driver in the state.
“There’s a risk associated with everything that we do in life,” Noem wrote on Twitter Wednesday. “Bikers get that better than anyone.”
So… the 400,000 Fauci-deniers in 2020 were responsible for 649 out of the 35,392,284 total cases thus far reported out of PCR toaster ovens in the U.S. Reprehensible! (see this Bill Burr video at 6:40 for the correct way to say “reprehensible”)
See also “Oxford study: 2020 Sturgis Rally tied to more than 400 COVID-19 cases across 30 states, 1 death”:
More than 463 COVID-19 cases across 30 states were directly connected to the Sturgis Rally in August and September 2020. Seventeen patients were hospitalized and one person died, according the report by the Oxford University Press for the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
The #Science-informed righteous condemned the Sturgis gathering in 2020 and they are condemning it this year as well.
Let’s look at a smaller mass gathering that is not condemned and for which there have been no calls for shutdown. Provincetown, Massachusetts has a population of about 3,000, which expands with tens of thousands of additional visitors during summer weekend (certainly not to 400,000; the town has essentially just two streets). From Slate:
According to a report the agency released on Friday, the CDC’s latest findings were based on a July 4 COVID-19 outbreak in queer mecca Provincetown, Massachusetts, where among a cluster of 469 (with no deaths) at the time of study, an astonishing three-quarters of the infected had been fully vaccinated. As of July 31, the P-Town outbreak had ballooned to 965 cases.
It was about halfway through our weeklong stay when one vaccinated friend from New York City began to report not feeling well. Unable to stop coughing, he and his boyfriend drove to Outer Cape Health Services, where he tested positive for COVID and immediately fled the cape. Soon after that, I began to hear whisperings—whether at the Mussel Beach gym or traditional “high tea” gatherings by the pool at the Boatslip Resort—of a “gay cough” circulating among some out-of-towners.
The gathering in Provincetown caused 2X as many cases as Sturgis 2020, despite being only about 1/10th the size (could there be a behavioral difference comparing Harley riders to P-town visitors?). Shouldn’t we expect public health experts to demand a governor’s order to shut down the P-town scene? Why is it irresponsible for motorcycle enthusiasts to gather in South Dakota and responsible for New Yorkers and Bostonians to gather in Provincetown?
Addressing the national lifeguard shortage (July 2018):
View of the harbor from the public library:
A P-town shop in which all genders are welcome, but only one gender ID has a future (July 2018):
The featured Young Adult Non-Fiction section at the public library (March 2019):
What if we try to merge the rainbow of Provincetown with the value system of Sturgis? We get “Better a Sister in a Whorehouse than a Brother on a Honda” T-shirts in a rainbow of colors!
Whorehouse shirts are on sale. Guess it’s not really better to get paid to bang confirmed bachelors than it is to ride on the VP of strategic global strategy’s bike.
If you pick 400,000 people at random, watch them for two months and include all their contacts, how many people would die …. of DEATH? If the average life expectancy is 80 years old, that’s 29,200 days and since you could die on any one of them from something, your chance of dying on any given day is 0.000034 or 0.0034% Let’s just count the 400,000, so we get 0.000034 x 61 days or 0.002074 x 400,000 people = 829 people DEAD of DEATH. Am I wrong here?
Even better question: If you put 400,000 people at random – of all ages – into America’s hospitals and performed medical procedures on them, what would their chances of dying from malpractice be? If you took the survivors and then fed them all at restaurants for 61 days, driving them an average of 20 miles each way to the restaurants, what would their chances of dying from food poisoning or in an automobile crash be. Finally, if you took those same survivors and forced them to drive to restaurants for 61 days in a row, how many of them would commit suicide?
Dr. Death is not saying COVID is not a risk. Dr. Death is saying that 400,000 (or 700,000) is a lot of people and a lot of them are going to die over the course of two months from all other kinds of causes.
Live as free as you can, because you can believe Dr. Death – nobody survives in the end.
Dr. Death, you raise good questions. Your general point is supported by reference to that land of Covid Catastrophe, Sweden, which as we all know brought Doom on itself by its obstinate refusal to #FollowTheScience.
According to their national statistics bureau, the situation in 2020 was so horrible that Sweden’s crude death rate per thousand was nearly as high as in the infamous plague year of 2012.
What about life expectancy in Sweden? For men it fell to the same level as during the medieval dark ages of 2016 (but slightly higher in 2020). For women, 2018 (ditto). Thank God the wise authorities in the US didn’t let that happen to their own people!
Here are the webcams!
https://sturgismotorcyclerally.com/webcams/?_ga=2.239288001.357128331.1628366995-838638582.1628366995
Also interesting: They’re moving all those people, pedestrians, bikes, cars, trucks and the occasional police cruiser pretty well through downtown Sturgis without traffic signals or anything else. Almost everyone is practicing the original meaning of “self driving vehicle” and they keep things flowing pretty well at the intersections.
Might there be even one, just one, small difference between Provincetown 2021 and Sturgis 2020? Can anyone think of anything? Anything?
Possibly a more infectious variant? Ah, yes. R-0 of 2.5 compared to R-0 of 8.
You must be right, cuz. When I think of “infectious” there’s nothing I want to see less than a mental picture of tens of thousands of fat, hairy dudes f*****g each other up the ass and listening to techno for a week or so.
And the practical difference between R0=8 and R0=2.5 is…. ptetty much nothing. Nearly all susceptible people will be infected, all others won’t. This is the nature of chain reactions. The higher R0 the less time the panfemic will take to run through population and to burn out. Now if we are talking about diffetence between 1.05 an 1.5…. but this is not the case.
Speaking as someone who has actually attended the Sturgis rallies on multiple occasions, the vast majority of those in attendance are upper, middle class boomers who trailer their bikes there and then ride up and down the streets (or actually street, because that’s basically what Sturgis is.) I’d lay odds that most of them are vaccinated.
This is not an event overwhelmingly populated by the standard “biker” profile.