Every tradition has to start somewhere.
Not me, personally, but I know a group of eight that are there. All unvaccinated (“muh freedums!”) and all from a Delta hotspot county north of me.
Idiots, the lot of them.
Last March the Burning Man Org announced that the event would be cancelled for the second year, citing there was simply no way to guarantee whether it would be safe in August. Although it has only 70,000 attendees there are a lot of moving parts it it was better to pull the plug early before too much had been committed only to be wasted later on. Several major theme camps had already announced they would be skipping, as early as January. There was great sadness but it’s looking like they made the right call.
I think it fair to point out that there are many other gatherings also taking place, Lollapalooza, 100% capacity ballparks. Singling this event out in 2021 is not particularly good reporting IMO.
The ballpark thing I get, but to be fair, Lottapalookas required proof of vaccination or negative covid test results. I still wouldn’t have gone, but that’s not nothing.
True, but how many of these other events have more than 500,000 attending? The current guess is more than 700,000 this year:
More than 500,000 would be a weekend of people at ballparks. Then Monday, Tuesday addons etc…
I am making the point that the months long lockdown button is much less likely to be pushed at this point. It’s going to be more “you’re on your own.” Yes, there is going to be continued and increased support for businesses and other entities that want to require proof of vaccinations. But full lockdown is a limited resource. So I do take question with the current LOL Sturgis hype, considering what else is going on.
I personally have not opened up that much. Don’t need to for work, kids still too young to get vaccinated. I want to keep my kids’ mostly outdoors and masked stuff open as long as reasonably possible. Because we already 100% virtual school for more than a year. I consider virtual school a degrading situation that will continue to decline if we need to go back 100%. People will simply stop caring. There are multiple components to everything going on with the pandemic, and I have always known that certain resources used to combat the pandemic are limited.
Seems MLB is doing the same for fans who don’t want to mask up. That’s been the case for Mariners home games and presumably all the other stadiums.
My 30yo nephew, a firefighter/emt, and his new spouse, a hospital nurse who has treated Covid patients, are going to this on their Harleys motoring from Chicago. They’re vaccinated, but it’s bananas to me that they’re going at all.
At least it’s Russian Roulette with one chamber loaded instead of four.
I don’t see how anybody can determine the effect of this year’s Sturgis. Last year everything was pretty calm and you could watch the cases start to crop up in SD and the surrounding states. Iowa took a particularly bad hit. This year the whole country is a blaze with Delta; Sturgis will be lost in the flood. If WI cases go up (like the Peshtigo Fire), who knows why?
I’m sure it will be a shit show; my boss just attended a family wedding (and they are ALL drinkers of the Trump kool-aid); so far, one week after (at last report, three days ago), at least 23 attendees have been diagnosed. And they themselves are all likely Rally-goers (historically they always have taken the week off to go).
How long after Sturgis last year did the Dakotas’ cases explode?
About 2 weeks. Almost like clockwork. Here’s the graph at the NYTimes. It’s the bump at the end of August/beginning of September.
Of course, the really big explosion was at the end of the year, but that happened across the whole country. And a noticeable bump 2 weeks after Christmas.
About three months of steady growth to see the full impact of Sturgis. Delta appears to have a higher effective reproduction number, so it might escalate faster. We’ll see.
I might end up eating my words, but I have a prediction. Over 0.2% of both South Dakota and North Dakota have already died of Covid. That means a huge % of the population has had Covid. Plus their vaccination rates are not that bad. Depending on how much overlap there is between previously infected and vaccinated people, there may be quite a bit of immunity in the population. Okay, so I’m going out on a limb and predict that cases may rise a week after the rally ends, but deaths won’t surge like they did last year.
Does the fact that the new “D” strain, which is much more dangerous and which pretty much wasn’t a factor in last year’s rally, is probably going to infect people there change your calculations?
Isn’t that generally how Russian Roulette is played anyway? 1 chamber loaded, the other 5 empty?
I’m assuming the D strain is not much more deadly, just that much more contagious. The vaccine is still pretty strong against hospitalization and death. One thing that’s more sketchy is that I’m also assuming that prior infection does incur some amount of protection against death. Obviously, I could be very wrong about that.
So, surge in cases and probably hospitalizations? Yes. Surge in deaths? Not as much as last year.
Uh, yeah. I was implying that the vaccinated relatives have a better chance of escaping harm than the rest of the Sturgis attendees – they’re the ones playing with four loaded cylinders.