The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally Was A Massive COVID-19 Superspreader Event, A New Study Claims

The massive Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, which brought more than 460,000 people to a tiny city of 7,000 residents in South Dakota in August, was a “superspreader” event that was responsible for more than 260,000 new cases of COVID-19 across the nation.

That’s the provocative conclusion from a new study from the Center for Health Economics & Policy Studies at San Diego State University, which also estimated that these cases cost the nation around $12.2 billion.

These numbers have been rejected by city and state officials, who noted that the study has not yet been peer reviewed. If more than a quarter of a million people really had been infected as a result of the rally, stories describing these cases would be showing up in newspapers across the country, Sturgis City Manager Daniel Ainslie told BuzzFeed News.