Is a motorcycle festival to blame for 250,000 corona infections?

reThe traditional motorcycle rally in the small American town of Sturgis, for which several hundred thousand motorcyclists arrived in South Dakota in August, could have triggered more than 250,000 corona virus infections. As US economists calculated, treating the infected would cost more than $ 12 billion. The study, which has now been published by the Economic Research Institute for the Future of Work (IZA) in Bonn, called the motorcycle rally, which took place in the remote Black Hills from August 7 to 16, as an event of great diffusion.

Most of the more than 460,000 cyclists had run out of masks and distance. Additionally, thousands celebrated together for days in the bars, restaurants and hotels of Sturgis. For the study “The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally and Covid-19”, economists evaluated data from visitors’ mobile phones. Following the example of previous studies, they calculated the costs of a Covid 19 case at an average of $ 46,000. “Given the total cost, I could have paid each of the 462,182 visitors $ 26,553 for not participating,” the study summarizes.

Cancellation would have been useless

The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally has drawn motorcyclists from across America to the Black Hills for more than 80 years. Although health authorities had warned of major events since the pandemic began, the city council had voted against canceling the demonstration. Motorcyclists, according to the reasoning, would get to Sturgis even without an official program.

Four days after the event ended, South Dakota health officials reported the first infection when the coronavirus was detected in a tattoo artist in Sturgis. Since the infected had tattooed visitors for four days, authorities expected more infections. Three weeks after the motorcycle rally, the number of infections had risen to 100.

Health authorities in eight other states also recorded Covid 19 infections in connection with the event. In South Dakota, the number of corona cases has increased by more than 130 percent in the past two weeks. In neighboring Minnesota, a sixty-year-old man died after a Covid-19 infection that he had previously spent a few days at the biker gathering.