[ExI] biker bump

[Dylan Distasio]

Current ground zero results:

RAPID CITY, S.D. (KOTA) -The City of Sturgis conducted mass COVID testing
for its citizens after welcoming hundreds of thousands of visitors for the
80th annual Motorcycle Rally. Now, the city is announcing the results.

A total of 650 people took advantage of the free testing, with 26 people
testing positive for COVID-19.

All of them were asymptomatic at the time of testing.

Sturgis city manager Daniel Ainslie says the rate of confirmed cases is
lower than what many people anticipated.

”We’re very happy that our mitigation efforts seem to have worked and that
there was very little spread into numerous businesses in our count, and
there’s very little spread among our employees in whole, which is very good
news,” Ainslie says.

This mass testing is just one of the measures in place to prevent further
spread -- and the City says they will continue to maintain all their
current protocols.

https://www.kotatv.com/2020/08/29/sturgis-mass-testing-results-announced/

On Sat, Aug 29, 2020 at 11:01 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
>
>
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> Dang, I am so annoyed at me for not having thought of this idea sooner,
> when we coulda gotten some useful data.
>
>
>
> We have long realized the Sturgis bike rally in SD could be a
> super-spreader event.  If we model the expected catch rate by the nearby
> community college (ignoring for the moment that the students wear masks and
> the bikers do not) I did some estimates, then estimated the expected biker
> bump in cases and about now the increase in covid deaths in the state.
>
>
>
> I was previously annoyed with me for not seeing if we could track that,
> but let myself off after I learned that the medics dang well have been
> thinking about this for some time and already had a way to trace their new
> cases to the rally by asking the patient one subtle, brilliant question:
> Did you go to the Sturgis rally?
>
>
>
> OK, they did that.  It was silly of me to think they would overlook
> something so obvious.  Now we have new case rates coming in from states,
> and it occurred to me we are still missing an important number: the
> percentage of Sturgisers from each state.  If we had that number we could
> see if the event was a super-spreader.  Ja?
>
>
>
> Without that number we still can’t really tell.
>
>
>
> But I blew that, because I realized we could have had a good easy way to
> get that number: just have volunteers go around and write down the state
> from the license plates.  From a sample of a few thousand bikes, we could
> have had a good estimate of the fraction from each state.
>
>
>
> OK so we know the data would be clustery for an understandable reason:
> bikers have clubs and clubs ride together, arrange to meet at Sturgis and
> hang together often.  So it wouldn’t surprise me if a walker down Sturgis
> streets would see 30 Michigan plates in a row.  So we would need enough
> volunteers to get perhaps 20k bikes, or ideally to make an audio recording
> into a phone: California California Michigan Iowa Iowa Iowa (and so forth)
> then transcribe it after the fun is over.
>
>
>
> Bikes park close together, so a single prole could collect 50 bikes in a
> minute if she hustles her buns.
>
>
>
> Oh we sooo coulda done this.  Had we done it right, we would be in better
> shape.
>
>
>
> But wait.  If I thought of this, others probably did too, and there were
> half a million proles at that rally.  OK cool, now if we can get those
> numbers, we are ready to calculate.
>
>
>
> Minnesota is reporting about 1000 cases they can trace to the rally.  But
> Minnesota is close to South Dakota and it is a big state where biking is
> popular, so they woulda supplied a lotta bikers, who were not catching
> while they were back in the state, which should have slightly reduced their
> rate during the rally and increased it the week after.  I am looking at the
> data and I don’t see it.
>
>
>
> I will keep watching, but for now I would say Sturgis was a possible
> spreader but not a super-spreader event.  So far.
>
>
>
> One can anticipate graduate studies and senior projects written about
> this, which are perhaps really just thinly-disguised but perfectly valid
> excuses to go to Sturgis.
>
>
>
> OK then.  Stand by for the answers to rumble in.
>
>
>
> spike
>
>
>
>
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