In early August, more than 460,000 motorcycle enthusiasts converged on Sturgis, S.D., for a 10-day celebration where few wore facial coverings or practiced social distancing. A month later, researchers have found that thousands have been sickened across the nation, leading them to brand the Sturgis rally a “superspreader” event.
They estimate that dealing with the fallout from the rally will involve more than $12 billion in health care costs.
“The spread of the virus due to the event was large,” the authors write because it hosted people from all over the country. But the severity of the spread was closely tied to the approaches to the pandemic by Sturgis attendees’ home states. In some places, any spread related to people returning from the rally was blunted by strong mitigation measures, like a face-mask mandate or a prohibition against indoor dining.
The findings come in a new paper, “The Contagion Externality of a Superspreading Event: The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally and COVID-19,” published by IZA — Institute of Labor Economics, a German think tank. Its four authors are all researchers affiliated with American universities.
It is not clear if the study was subject to peer review. Researchers contacted by Yahoo News did not immediately respond to requests for an interview.
The rally was held in a state whose governor, Kristi Noem, is a close Trump supporter and, like the president, a skeptic of many coronavirus mitigation measures, such as the wearing of face masks. And while the rally itself had no political orientation, Trump has made overtures to bikers, even inviting some to ride at the White House. At the Sturgis rally, a group called Bikers for Trump registered voters.
The new research paper contains an unlikely but telling quotation from Steve Harwell, singer for the band Smash Mouth, which performed at this year’s rally: “Now we’re all here together tonight. And we’re being human once again. F*** that COVID s***.” Trump used a Smash Mouth song during the 2016 campaign; the band played at the Lincoln Memorial ahead of his 2017 presidential inauguration.
Many of the researchers behind the Sturgis study previously examined the protests against police brutality that swept across the nation earlier this summer. Many Trump supporters wondered why neither the media nor public health professionals condemned those protests when they seemed to plainly contravene social distancing guidelines. But most people at those protests wore masks, and there was virtually no indoor socializing of the kind that aerosol scientists say poses the highest risk of viral transmission. That combination prevented those protests from becoming superspreader events.