The annual Sturgis motorcycle rally in South Dakota is America’s largest bike rally, a 10-day blowout, with attendance this year exceeding 250,000. It was also a serious pandemic stress test. By bringing together hundreds of thousands of people, Sturgis helps answer a simple yet critically important question: Are we at a point in the pandemic where we can safely stage big-crowd events?
If there were a place where this could have happened, it should have been Sturgis. The best data suggests that at least 75 percent of the entire South Dakota population has some degree of immunity against the virus: About half of South Dakotans have immunity because they’ve been infected by covid-19, and about half of the population has been vaccinated — some of whom have already had covid-19 when they got their shot, so there is some overlap between these two groups. South Dakota, despite its middling vaccination rates, probably has among the highest levels of population immunity in the nation, driven largely by horrifying winter outbreaks.
That’s what makes Sturgis an important test. If it had gone off without big spikes in covid cases, it would have provided strong evidence […]
I was closed out of the rest of the article, but it’s interesting that South Dakota has a 75% immunity—I wouldn’t have guessed it to be that high—though largely because people had the virus. That immunity fades faster than the vaccine’s immunity fades though, according to what I’ve read. So there are spikes there and fading immunity, not a good combo for future months and not a good idea to have large gatherings yet.