Sturgis Festival: 460,000 bikers met zero corona requirements

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Sturgis Festival: 460,000 bikers met zero corona requirements
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Sturgis Festival: 460,000 bikers met zero corona requirements

Motorcycle Festival in Sturgis 2020
460,000 bikers met zero corona requirements

The annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally is considered one of the largest motorcycle events in the world. In 2020 over 460,000 bikers came – despite the corona pandemic.


Uli Baumann

14.09.2020

Sturgis is a small town in South Dakota, USA with just under 7,000 inhabitants. Once a year all hell breaks loose over Sturgis. Exactly when the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally rises. An event that has brought around half a million two-wheelers to the city in recent years.

No corona requirements

In 2020, the year in which the corona pandemic prevented major events worldwide, Sturgis still took place. Ok, instead of the 700 to 800 exhibitors from previous years, only about 300 had agreed for 2020. Harley-Davidson had canceled all of its activities and also banned its employees from traveling to Sturgis. Competitor Indian offered test drives on site, but emphasized that it had a safety concept. The US state of South Dakota itself had not imposed any corona requirements. So there is no mask requirement and there was also no lockdown. There are only restrictions when driving through the Indian reservations in South Dakota.

No rejection wanted

The majority of the city council of Sturgis had spoken out in favor of canceling the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, but was threatened with legal action by various exhibitors. After all, the festival is expected to generate total sales of around $ 800 million. In addition, a large part of the rally takes place on state land, so that the municipality lacked the means for a ban.

The organizers expected around 250,000 visitors for the 80th edition of the rally. But then 462,182 registered visitors came. This makes Sturgis the world’s largest gathering of people since the beginning of the corona pandemic.

Study estimates 260,000 corona cases

Observers will see a new corona hotspot and a superspreader event in the festival when the participants will spread over the whole of the USA after the weekend. Others also see great damage to the image of motorcyclists. And after the festival came what had to come. Authorities reported the first corona cases from participants. A study by the Center for Health Economics & Policy Studies (CHEPS) of the University of San Diego even declared Sturgis to be “Superspreader event”. The authors of the study link the biker meeting with over 260,000 corona cases – around 19 percent of all cases reported between August 2 and September 2 in the USA. The governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem, does not recognize the study based on anonymized cell phone data of the participants. According to the governor, so far there has only been one corona fatality that is clearly related to the Sturgis meeting. Meanwhile, numerous other US states are reporting corona cases that are said to have their origins in the Sturgis meeting.

The USA now accounts for around a quarter of all registered corona cases worldwide. John Hopkins speaks of 5.2 million for the United States out of 20.5 million worldwide. The number of deaths in the United States is around 170,000, which is about 20 percent of corona deaths worldwide.

Conclusion

The USA suffers from Corona like hardly any other country, yet around 460,000 bikers meet in South Dakota without any hygiene concept. There are some things that can just be astonishing.

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