Bikers From at Least 39 States Tracked to Rally With Few Masks

Two days after the 80th annual motorcycle rally in Sturgis, S.D., came to an end, health officials across the country are watching to see if attendees at the largest U.S. mass gathering since March brought home Covid-19 as an unwanted souvenir.

Cell phone data gathered by research firm Safegraph shows that visitors, many eschewing the use of protective masks, hailed from at least 39 states and 680 counties on the first day of the 10-day event.

Thousands arrived from states like Texas, Florida and other regions throughout the Sun Belt that have seen record-high virus levels in recent weeks. The data was compiled from a representative sample of phones and tracks movement based on where the phone is located in relation to where the owner resides the majority of the time.

The rally took place as scheduled just ahead of the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, both of which were converted to virtual events because of concerns they couldn’t be held safely in person. While there are questions about widely reported estimates that the Sturgis rally would attract 250,000 people, attendance was many times the 6,200 who attended a June rally for President Donald Trump in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that the local health department’s director said “likely contributed” to a surge in infections.

Covid-19 symptoms may take as long as 14 days to appear, so it won’t be clear for some time as to whether the Sturgis event was a “super spreader,” as some officials feared. Prior to the rally, Minnesota Health Commissioner Jan Malcolm told reporters that state officials were “concerned with any large gathering, sustained contact of that nature,” and that the rally, which ended on Sunday, was “sort of a recipe for something to happen.”

Crowded Parties, Few Masks

South Dakota Department of Transportation data shows roughly 50,000 vehicles arrived in the tiny town on Aug. 7, the first day of the rally, and more than 365,000 entered the city over its first seven days. That count, though, includes duplicates where some riders stayed outside of town and returned on multiple days.

Rebecca Piroutek, a spokeswoman for South Dakota’s health department, said Tuesday that officials are monitoring the situation. The department “notifies the state of residence for any out-of-state COVID-19 cases identified in South Dakota,” and that if those “out-of-state cases have exposed a South Dakota resident, the SD-DOH will receive that information from another state and notify the close contact,” she said in a statement. She didn’t say if those measures have been triggered by the Sturgis rally.

Photos taken during the event as well as live webcams showed widespread disregard for mask-wearing, including at crowded parties and gatherings indoors and out.

Motorcyclists ride through downtown Deadwood, South Dakota during the 80th Annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally on August 8. Officials estimated that more than 250,000 people may have attended despite the coronavirus pandemic.

(Photo by Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images)

Chris Cox, founder of Bikers for Trump, told a crowd Friday that the coronavirus is a “plandemic,” according to the AP, a reference to a debunked conspiracy theory and a recent film by the same name that label the virus a politically motivated hoax.

Residents complained mightily before the event took place, asking the city to cancel it. But many business leaders pushed for it to go on, pointing to the hundreds of millions of dollars spent around the rally each year.

“This is a huge foolish mistake to make, to host the rally this year,” Sturgis resident Linda Chaplin told the city council at a public meeting in June, according to the AP.

South Dakota Republican Gov. Kristi Noem supported the Sturgis rally taking place and didn’t put in place any mask mandates, echoing her overall approach to mask-wearing across the state.

Noem, appearing on Fox News a few days before the rally began, encouraged people to attend, saying “what works is washing your hands and making good decisions.”

Meanwhile, the coronavirus continues to wreak havoc across the U.S., even as other countries have managed to tamp down the virus in recent months. The latest projections released by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, known as IHME, found 31 states, including South Dakota, haven’t yet seen a peak in new infections from the virus.

The organization predicts the U.S. could be expected to reach nearly 300,000 cases by Dec. 1 given current conditions. It also said consistent mask-wearing outside the home could potentially save 70,000 lives.

On Tuesday, Republican Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, called Sturgis “a real clear warning to us” and said he would require masks at the Loconia biker rally set to take place later this month in his state. He issued an emergency order requiring masks to be worn for certain gatherings of more than 100 people.

“I don’t think anyone saw the photos out of Sturgis and said, ‘that looks safe,’ ” Sununu said at a press conference.