The MAGAt anti-science mindset is going to kill us all

[Scooter]

Screw Covid, I'm going to Sturgis

A metamorphosis occurs each August in Sturgis, SD. The small 7,000 person town is invaded (peacefully) by a steady stream of Harleys, Indians, and Triumphs among countless other motorcycle brands. The rumbles of their engines bubbling at each intersection can be heard throughout the town. It’s the Sturgis motorcycle rally and Sturgis has grown to a population of around half a million people – It now contains the same population as Kansas City, MO and Raleigh, NC.

In the year 2020 public health authorities warned them not to allow it. Kristi Noem, Governor of South Dakota at the time, ignored them. The mayor threw up his hands and told the NY Times, “do you want me to build a wall around Sturgis or a wall around South Dakota, because that is the only way we could have stopped it.”

He was right, just like every other year, they rolled in. Concerts and crowded bars. Hardly a mask in sight. They even sold t-shirts mocking the pandemic. My kids bought me one off of e-bay as a father’s day joke the next year. “Screw Covid, I’m going to Sturgis.”

What happened next was predictable. Covid spread. It wasn’t like Las Vegas. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. What happens in Sturgis doesn’t stay there, it spreads everywhere.

In my book I summarized research estimates from the Center for Health Economics & Policy Studies at San Diego State University. They put the number of cases connected to Sturgis in the range of 115,000-260,000, or 10 to 20 percent of all cases in the US at the time. This was just one month after the rally occurred and it was still spreading. Yesterday a new research study was published that makes the wave of infection that spread out of Sturgis more visible.



In the left column of the graph above you can see the frontline of the Covid wave expanding outward from Sturgis. In the figure below you see the same wave in the top row but it also indicates the intensity of the caseload, with darker colors having more cases.



Sturgis was the epitome of the “you do you, I’ll do me” individual choice mindset at the height of the Covid pandemic. Many people simply wouldn’t accept that their choice had effects on other people. And those people weren’t just their partners and kids or their grandchildren and grandparents. It was also the kids on the school bus and the teachers in the schools. The people you worked with and the people they served. It was the doctors and nurses and other staff at the hospital. It was the barista at Starbucks and the maid at the hotel. The cashiers at CVS and the local grocery. It was all the people connected to them and onward and onward. Individual choices cascaded outward like ripples from a stone tossed in a pond. When you’re sitting in the middle of it, you can’t see the damage spread outward and spiral out of control. Nonetheless, it was there. And now we can see it.

Troy Tassier is a professor of economics at Fordham University and the author of The Rich Flee and the Poor Take the Bus: How Our Unequal Society Fails Us during Outbreaks.

[ex-khobar Andy]

Wow. Pretty convincing. I recall the furore at the time but I hadn't seen the followup and I had forgotten that Noem was governor of SD and supported the Sturgis rally. Her first but not her last exhibition of public idiocy.

The paper on which all this is based is freely available at https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/ ... #abstract1 . Usually this sort of publication is paywalled.