Dozens of coronavirus infections traced back to Sturgis Rally

[TomCADem]

Source: LA Times

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. — The hundreds of thousands of bikers who attended the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally may have departed western South Dakota, but public health departments in multiple states are trying to measure how much and how quickly the coronavirus spread in bars, tattoo parlors and gatherings before people traveled home to nearly every state in the country.

From the city of Sturgis, which is conducting mass testing for its roughly 7,000 residents, to health departments in at least six states, health officials are trying to track outbreaks from the 10-day rally, which ended on Aug. 16. They face the task of tracking an invisible virus that spread among bar-hoppers and rally-goers, who then traveled to over half of the counties in the United States.

An analysis of anonymous cellphone data from Camber Systems, a firm that aggregates cellphone activity for health researchers, found that 61% of all the counties in the U.S. have been visited by someone who attended Sturgis, creating a travel hub that was comparable to a major U.S. city.

“Imagine trying to do contact tracing for the entire city of [Washington,] D.C., but you also know that you don’t have any distancing, or the distancing is very, very limited, the masking is limited,” said Navin Vembar, who co-founded Camber Systems. “It all adds up to a very dangerous situation for people all over the place. Contact tracing becomes dramatically difficult.”

Read more: https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-08-25/sturgis-rally-coronavirus-dozens-infections

[orleans]

1. with the amount of people who went there

(i thought around a quarter of a million were attending)
i'm surprised it is only "dozens"

[12over]

8. same here.

first reaction to story?

huh, dozens isnt too bad.

[TomCADem]

23. At Least 103 New Coronavirus Cases in 8 States Linked to South Dakota Motorcycle Rally

The event just ended on August 16, so folks who might be coming down with it are probably just starting to show symptoms and may be dismissing at first as nothing more than a cold. It will probably be at least two weeks before you really get a sense of what the impact was.

https://people.com/health/103-covid-cases-8-states-linked-sturgis-motorcycle-rally/

More than 100 confirmed cases of COVID-19 across eight states have been linked to the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally held earlier this month in South Dakota.

Jeremy Fugleberg, regional health correspondent for Forum News Service, reported Tuesday on Twitter that at least 103 new cases of coronavirus are connected to the annual 10-day event, which was held from Aug. 7 to Aug. 16 in Sturgis. It was attended by hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom did not wear masks and clearly violated social distance orders.

South Dakota has reported 37 cases linked to the event, state epidemiologist Josh Clayton told Inforum.

Minnesota has reported 27 cases linked to the rally. While 25 were attendees, the other two were employees or volunteers at the event, Minnesota Department of Health Commissioner Jan Malcolm and Director of Infectious Disease and Epidemiology Kris Ehresmann told local news station KSTP.

[tenderfoot]

25. dozens more than Benghazi

[GusBob]

10. Thats not the point at all

They left to spread it all over the country, making mitigation nearly impossible

Only takes one super spreader to wreck a community

[ananda]

13. Testing and diagnosis is very iffy these days.

...

[DENVERPOPS]

15. Just hold on orleans

it is still early in the game..........I will wait to see what happens in three to six weeks. It is not just the participants in Sturgis, it is their families they returned to and everyone they contact in their home cities.......And,the Sturgis crowd may well be just the tip of the iceberg. Remember the Cruise Ship Fiasco, or the Aircraft Carrier Debacle, Mardi Gras, the beach parties, etc etc etc etc

[hatrack]

16. It only ended nine days ago . ..

Incubation seems to be around two weeks, with some variability by individuals, naturally.

[IronLionZion]

2. There wasn't much masking or social distancing in the videos of the event

and people must have spread it to others as they stopped along the way home. The people who worked at the bars, tattoo parlors, food vendors, etc. probably came from all over and spread it too.

[Botany]

3. Go figure ... Darwin always wins

BTW the vast majority are Trump supporters too.

[Buckeye_Democrat]

9. Even without a pandemic, there's nothing fun-looking...

... about it to me.

Yet that's true for me regarding almost any large gathering of people, I guess.

[llashram]

18. no masks for a vast majority

here. 4 brown skin people 3 with masks. A t-shirt that looked like a BLM t-shirt-but it said, Black Hills Matter. Looks like trumpers to me...the latest I read on health is 103 new cases in 8 states linked to this rally...I posted link in GD

[backroadblast]

24. That's looks about as exciting as watching paint dry

like going to the beach without the beach.
pointless waste of money.

if you must find a 15.00 dollar glass of beer, you don't need to go all the way to south dakota.

[hadEnuf]

4. How could this have happened?????

[dalton99a]

5. Shocking development.

[durablend]

6. Could. not. have. predicted.

[Warpy]

7. Loud Motorcycle Guy was gone over that period

and was back for three days but has been silent for a while.

Dare I hope he'll get busted back to Boring Sedan Guy?

(I've heartily disliked him ever since he removed his muffler before he learned how to ride that thing, up and down the street, back and forth, day after day until he got his license. Jerk)

[Miigwech]

11. I checked a nation web site last week that sells Harleys

to document how many were for sale. I'll check back in a month to see if there is a dramatic increase in the numbers but was wondering if there would be a seasonal factor for any increase? Morbid yes, but I got the idea from an earlier poster. It made sense that a bunch of those Covidiots would harm themselves by getting infected. Thus, more motorcycles for sale.

[Illumination]

20. That was me that mentioned it several times. Let us know what you find...Thanks!

[Miigwech]

22. Will do.

[GusBob]

12. I know people here ride, but I am not a fan of donor-cycle riders or their rallies

After living in Daytona for decades, bikers those "rugged individualists" who all look, dress, and act alike lost their charm

They are mostly Trumper types, and also the type of person who would brag about catching 'rona at Sturgis

Remember: Helmet Laws Suck!

My ER friends called them donor-cycles

[Illumination]

21. They are scary to me, but maybe I'm just too darn straight!

[PatrickforO]

14. Based on the known morbidity numbers and so on,

I calculated that, of the participants at Sturgis itself, around 170,000 will catch the virus. Some will be asymptomatic, some won't. Of these, 6,800 will die of the virus.

Of the 170,000, assuming that, without masks, each person can infect another 46 people, we have a real problem. Fortunately, most people in the country see the wisdom in masks, so it probably won't be that high. But still.

I am part of an IONS group that meets virtually on the third or fourth Saturday of each month, and in the last meeting we were talking about Type 1 and Type 2 errors, because we have several PhDs in the group.

To refresh people here, a Type 1 error is 'we believe A, but A is not true.' A Type 2 error is 'we don't believe A, but A is true.'

In terms of the logic behind wearing a mask, here's how it works. If we believe that wearing a mask can't protect you from COVID but it isn't true - wearing a mask can protect you, then by wearing the mask, even if you personally don't believe in it, you are keeping the virus from spreading. This is a type 1 scenario, and in the case of the pandemic, is a selfless act. You voluntarily inconvenience yourself just in case it is helpful to others.

The type 2 scenario is what played out at Sturgis - "We ain't wearing no masks! We're healthy 'Murikans! Nothing is going to happen if we exercise our free-dumb and don't wear them!" So - they don't believe A, but unfortunately for them, A is true. So we have a big flash-point of new infections due to this error in logic.

[abqtommy]

17. This is the self-thinning herd... stupidity is seldom rewarded by evolution. I'm pleased to live

in the State of New Mexico and the City of Albuquerque that both have statutes that mandate masking
and distancing.

[BlueStater]

19. Why describe the virus as "invisible"? That's just stupid.

First off, the virus isn’t invisible. It’s just too small to be seen by humans through natural means. Secondly, all viruses are like that and don’t get described as such, so why refer to this one that way?

I think President Idiot repeatedly referring to this thing as “the invisible enemy” has gotten stuck in the minds of these writers.