If you happen to come across a stranger riding a motorcycle in the next few days, especially if they’re sporting red, white and blue regalia or wearing a MAGA hat, I’d get out the N95 before spending any time in their presence. They could be one of the nearly three quarters of a million people dedicated to spreading a deadly disease all over the country:
The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally is all about crowds.
But in August 2021, it’s not just the crowds that have epidemiologists freaking out. It’s who is in them.
Interviews this week suggest many attendees of the days-long death march here are unvaccinated people who, in addition to often refusing masks, are rejecting the best tool there is to curb the raging pandemic.
It’s not exactly shocking that the hundreds of thousands of people packing into a crowded event like this one—led by pandemic skeptics like Gov. Kristi Noem—would be disproportionately composed of the unvaccinated. But experts suggested the event’s wide reach, along with the spiral of the new and unrelenting Delta variant, could spell nationwide disaster.
“Hope’s not a strategy right now. Vaccination is,” Dr. Michael Osterholm, a University of Minnesota professor of public health and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy who advised the Joe Biden transition, told The Daily Beast. “And there will be people who will be infected as a result of this event.
“The question for everybody is, how many?”
For most of the year, the northern Black Hills are thinly populated, with abundant wild areas dotted with a few small towns and cities.
During the summer, tourists flock in.
When the rally roars into the region in early August, the population explodes, as hundreds of thousands of people rush to Sturgis and the surrounding area to ride motorcycles, attend rock concerts, and drink in bars. This year, the estimate was that up to 700,000 people may attend the rally, which officially started Friday and runs through Sunday.Advertisement
All this is happening as the Delta variant of COVID-19 is rapidly spreading across the country, sending thousands of people to hospitals, and many to morgues.Advertisement
But at the rally itself, bikers typically scoff at such warnings. Almost no masks were evident across the region this week.
Sturgis Public Information Officer Christina Steele, who serves as a rally spokeswoman, told The Daily Beast that while the event has been crowded, she doubted it would top the record 750,000 people who came for the 75th anniversary in 2015.
Much more alarming: Steele said she had heard no concerns about COVID-19.
“Only the media,” she said with a laugh. “I only hear about that from media. No one is talking about it.”
Jeff and Julie Johnson of Denver, Colorado, were at the rally for three days and left Sunday night with smiles on their faces. Neither one was vaccinated, but they said they were not concerned either.
“I’ve worked through the whole thing without it,” Jeff, 54, told The Daily Beast.
Carl McCormack, 55, and his buddy Andrew Rick, 54, both of Blackhawk, S.D., a small town just outside of Rapid City, said they took two weeks vacation during the rally each year to ride and party.
“This is our time,” McCormack said.
Neither one is vaccinated, and they were not alone, a testament to the bubble—ideological, but not, as experts might hope, biological—here of those unconcerned with the pandemic.
“No one I know is vaccinated,” Rick said.
I know that some of these people are going to unnecessarily die of COVID and I will feel nothing. They seem to have decided they can’t get it and they are wrong. But there’s nothing we can do about that delusion. But I am horrified for all the people who can’t get vaccinated and the fact that these nihilists are providing their bodies to the virus so it can mutate and spread. But they are going to do it and a lot of people are going to feel the consequences of their stubborn ignorance.