Oh, for fuck’s sake. I lived there for several years and it’s not even close to that.
https://heritagearearesources.com/wp-content/uploads//2020/02/Tourism-Spending-by-State-US.jpg
As a former resident of the area, who has more than “been to Sturgis”… You are absolutely dead wrong. The locals eat that shit up just as much as anybody else does. People take the week off from work throughout the Black Hills to take part, and the same applies at least as far away as Gillette, Wyoming (my current home, about 120 miles from Sturgis).
Hey, come on, it’s bigger than Alaska, Delaware, and, I think that’s Rhode Island. Major tourism!
<Wayne and Garth>Hey, we’re in Delaware.
Honestly, I would have thought it’s bigger than North Dakota, because at least I’ve heard of some tourist destinations in SD, but I would have been wrong. They seem to be close to the lower limit of $2.2 billion.
Still, he’s probably factually correct that “most are not from South Dakota.” If Sturgis attracts 500k people to a state with fewer than 900k, it pretty much has to be the case that less than 50% are from out of state – I just can’t imagine any event that would be attended by more than 25% (250k/900k) of a state’s population.
Last year, over 2.1 million attended the Minnesota State Fair over its’ 12 days. Our overall population in 2019 was 5.64 million.
The State Fair is a big deal.
And it was canceled this year.
We actually have a sane governor, who understands the massive risks and decided the health of his residents is vastly more important than Jimmy showing his Hereford.
Hell, I spent countless hours on my first ever needlework entry for nothing. Poor Marjorie Johnson (100 years old), the winningest baker ever, had to take a pass.
For the common good is understood by so few, especially by Gov Noem, who - like what will happen after their fair with all the cattle - think “Hey, I made money off these poor dumb animals, now they’re off to slaughter”.
These numbers are all misleading. The 2.1 million for the state fair are ticket admissions. So, if somebody decided to show up almost every day, that’s more than 10 attendances for a single person. Naturally, that won’t be the case for everybody, but it does mean 2.1 million unique individuals did not visit the fair. They wouldn’t even track that anyway. And most of the population of the state lives in the Twin Cities area anyway (in excess of 3 million), so it’s not exactly a huge distance to travel for the vast majority.
The estimated Sturgis numbers are a bit different. They base it on vehicle entrances from the Department of Transportation, how many vendor licenses they sell, and how much trash is picked up. So, it’s not the same comparison.
That said, people come and leave. It’s not like 400k+ people were there every day. But even tens of thousands of people coming in each day is bad enough.
Ohh, totally agree that most at the rally are not local. But the idea that most Black Hills residents avoid the rally is ridiculous on its face. I was born and raised in the area, and my family still lives there (one set of grandparents and my oldest daughter actually currently live in Sturgis, the rest throughout the northern Hills).
The rally is a big deal to the locals. In fact, it’s downright annoying living in the area and being one of the few that hates literally every aspect of it (okay, I’ll amend that to say I enjoy eating jumbo smoked turkey legs from the roadside vendors if I’m forced to go…). It’s such a big deal (and disruptive force) that it can be hard to find places to rent in the northern Hills that don’t have a clause in the lease saying that you need to vacate the premises from August 1 to August 15… Because it is not uncommon for landlords to rent out an $800/month property for $5000 for that week or two to a small group of bikers from out-of-state.
I can only assume the claim that most residents avoid the rally was an attempt to shift the blame for the current spike in cases to something else, which is ridiculous.
I completely agree with this. It was really just a nitpick.
No one ever claimed Sturgis didn’t attract people from out of state. I claimed the SD state fair likely didn’t attract many people from put of state, and URN misread that as me saying that Sturgis was largely in state.
This whole hijack is from a misread of my claim that Sturgis was more likely to have a nation-wide impact (and import cases into SD) and so an order of magnitude more dangerous than a state fair.
Does anyone disagree with that?
No disagreement here.
Part of the shame of Sturgis is the town decided to hold the rally only after figuring that even if they didn’t, a hundred thousand people or more would show up anyway. Short of asking the governor to call out the National Guard to turn bikers away (assuming the governor of South Dakota would have considered that), they didn’t have a lot of choice. And an extra hundred thousand people or more would require preparation - it isn’t a big town, and the event requires additional sanitation and security measures. The city council barely voted to have it - and only because they knew that they had to do the prep or their streets would be literally covered in shit at the end of it.
And yes, if Minnesota can cancel its State Fair - which is some people’s major source of income in addition to the 4H kids who will have no where to show their cow (I feel for them, like I feel for the kids who didn’t get their Senior track and field year or their Senior prom or their Senior musical or their graduation, and are now stuck in a gap year or at college attending classes on Zoom unable to have a college social life - and the college students supposed to be doing their year abroad, and the ones who had their Summer internships cancelled… a lot of people have had to give stuff up)
Relevant Family Guy cutaway on North Dakota.
Ha! That’s awesome.
(North Dakota sucks…)
The person who died was over 60 and had preexisting health problems, and so was doubly stupid.
As for fairs, out county fair got canceled. I don’t remember even seeing that on the news, since canceling it was so obvious it hardly counted as news. Ditto for our town street fair.
What were those numbers again? Say 200,000 people went to Sturgis and something like 120 caught the virus? Thats a much smaller number than many colleges are reporting.
It’s reported that 200,000 went to Sturgis and over 199,700 did not report or test positive for covid-19 yet. Or more like 99.85%
Where are you getting 120 people? Even the article from several days ago state that 260 are directly linked to the rally. When you have a reproduction number of 2-4, you could be talking about a thousand people. And that 260 is simply people who admit they could have gotten it from the rally. There’s plenty of people who won’t admit that. Plus, you’re not even counting the people who had to serve these people in businesses who could catch it and then spread it. That’s why I gave you the link. Here’s Pennington co. Numbers suddenly going up exactly when you would expect them to go up. There is no way there’s only 100 or so people affected by this: https://doh.sd.gov/news/coronavirus.aspx#updates
Isn’t the pandemic raging throughout the US? What reason is there to believe that the participants were more exposed at the rally than they would have been back home, or wherever else they may have spent the time, doing whatever else it is they would have done?
Do they normally hang out in clusters of 200,000?
I’m sure they don’t, but I also wonder if there is an effective size limit to any one individual’s cluster. Particularly if sitting in proximity for extended periods (like on a long bus ride) is a bigger risk factor for spread.