[ExI] sturgis - washington post

[spike at rainier66.com]

> On Behalf Of Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat



> 

>>... The number comes from the suspected number of people who caught at the 

> rally.  If you take half million-randomly chosen yanks and compare to 

> the number traceable to the rally, it appears the rally catch rate was about half the average.

 

>...Apples and oranges, don't you think? Unless Sturgis rally attendees are like a random sample of US-Americans (what you mean by 'yanks' and not, say, New Englanders)...

 

All USians are yanks.  I have heard that is a generally accepted term, so I use it for us.

 

>...then it's the wrong comparison. Do attendees randomly come from all over the US? 

 

Hard to say.  I would think in general riders are more likely to attend if they live closer, but I know there are a lot of clubs that love a good long ride out to Sturgis.

 

I might be overlooking something really obvious here.  If people do ride far, it represents several days in which they have little or no contact with others.  It might be that alone that can explain it: they are more likely to arrive at Sturgis without having caught in the previous few days, when they were on the road.  Creating a statistical model for that is very difficult, but it is a compelling argument, possibly more so than my notion that sunshine on bare skin raised vitamin D levels, offering a bit of extra protection (that notion under-accounts for the difference.)

 

My own club went to Sturgis a little later (by three weeks (they are the older crowd (even compared to the geriatric Sturgis main event crowd (so they prefer to not camp on the ground (so they go after the main event (the few hotels around Sturgis are available then (and I can cheerfully report that no one caught and no one crashed (I really worry about this crowd (several are over 80 now.)))))))

 

No matter how we try to analyze this, there are unknowns and speculation, but if one goes to about 2 wks after the rally (late August) I see only one state which one can recognize a surge, and that is in South Dakota where the rally was held.  Irony: the actual ground zero, the town of Sturgis, didn't have a surge.

 

On the other hand... several of those Midwest states are having huge surges now, which cannot be reasonably traced to the Sturgis rally: it ended over 2 months ago.

 

An example is Idaho, which had a decline in the weeks following the rally.  The surge starting in mid September would have given enough time for healthy returners from Sturgis to catch back in their own home state after the rally.  This too must be offered as a possibility: bike clubs had post-rally parties with their stay-home friends and caught there?

 

I am completely at a loss to explain the huge surge a full two months after the end of the rally.  I suppose we must look at school openings there as the most likely explanation, but if so, why didn’t the bikers see something similar?  I am watching for my own confirmation bias: I fully expected a catastrophic surge after the rally, and urged my own club to not go at all this year.  On the other hand, although it didn’t turn out as I expected, that was one prediction I am most pleased to have flubbed.  I have never been more pleased to be proven wrong than the non-super-spreader that was Sturgis 2020 (from what I can tell, it wasn’t even a normal-spreader (but I still cannot explain why.))

 

spike

 



 

 

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