Can We Please Exercise Some Skepticism About That Report Linking Sturgis to 267,000 Cases of COVID-19?
MINOT, N.D. — A lot of people in the political world, and in the media industry, really want the recent Sturgis motorcycle rally to have been a pandemic disaster.
And, to be sure, hundreds of cases have been linked to the event, which drew in the ballpark of a quarter-million attendees to Meade County, S.D., with nearly three-quarters of them coming from outside of South Dakota and its neighboring states.
“A Forum News Service analysis of publicly reported information has raised the tally of COVID-19 cases linked to Sturgis to 310 in 13 states, but that number will be limited due to the patchwork nature of state case reporting and contact tracing, which isn’t built to report and track infections from an event with attendees from multiple states,” my colleague, Jeremy Fugleberg, reports.
I don’t doubt that the actual count of cases linked to Sturgis is likely higher than 310, but is it 86,000% higher?
