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PIERRE, S.D. – Wednesday, Governor Kristi Noem issued the following statement on the grossly misleading San Diego State CHEPS study regarding COVID-19 cases following the Sturgis rally:
“This report isn’t science; it’s fiction. Under the guise of academic research, this report is nothing short of an attack on those who exercised their personal freedom to attend Sturgis,” said Governor Noem. “Predictably, some in the media breathlessly report on this non-peer reviewed model, built on incredibly faulty assumptions that do not reflect the actual facts and data.
“At one point, academic modeling also told us that South Dakota would have 10,000 COVID patients in the hospital at our peak. Today, we have less than 70. I look forward to good journalists, credible academics, and honest citizens repudiating this nonsense.”
For more data on COVID-19 in South Dakota, visit COVID.SD.GOV.
The 10 day rally was held Aug 7-16, 2020 in Sturgis, SD.
(FOX News reported) Nineteen percent of the 1.4 million new coronavirus cases in the U.S. between Aug. 2 and Sept. 2 can be traced back to the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally held in South Dakota, according to researchers from San Diego State University’s Center for Health Economics & Policy Studies.
That’s more than 266,000 coronavirus cases attributed to the 10-day event, which more than 460,000 people attended despite fears it could become a so-called super-spreader event.
“We conclude that the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally generated public health costs of approximately $12.2 billion,” the researchers wrote in a paper. “This is enough to have paid each of the estimated 462,182 rally attendees $26,553.64 not to attend.”
from the local Fox TV KEVN:
RAPID CITY, S.D. (KEVN) – “Antithetical” and “outrageous.” That’s what the City of Sturgis calls the recent IZA Institute of Labor Economics report.
The report’s main find says 267,000 cases nationwide, or 20% of the cases in the U.S., can be linked to the 80th Sturgis Motorcycle Rally.
In a press release issued by the city on Wednesday, Sturgis officials claim this is “blatantly faulty.”
“We recognize that individuals were exposed to the virus on their trip to, from or while at the Rally,” the release says. “But the data reported by health officials across the nation show that the impact from the event was a mere fraction of what was projected and anticipated by many of the experts.”
The press release points to the city’s mass testing ratio–where 26 out of 650 tested positive–as a reason for the report being incorrect.
Sturgis officials blame media outlets for being fixated on the Rally’s infection rate and pushing models that hospitals would be overwhelmed.
“Following this event are reminiscent of the models that told us that locally our hospitals would be overwhelmed, we would have a massive lack of ventilators, and 3-5% of us would not survive,” the release said. “Fortunately, as we have seen, the underlying assumptions of these models were unfounded and categorically inaccurate, just as is the conclusion of this report.”
This comment comes after state health officials and the governor have dismissed and negated the IZA report Tuesday.
The report gathered its results by using cellphone data from SafeGraph, Inc. It showed “smartphone pings from nonresidents” and “foot traffic at restaurants and bars, retail establishments and entertainment venues, hotels and campgrounds each rose substantially” through Aug. 7 through 16. It says the Rally is linked to an estimated 267,000 COVID-19 cases nationwide and claims the overall health costs from the Rally are $12.2 billion.
According to its website, “IZA is a nonprofit research institute and the leading international network in labor economics, comprising more than 1,600 scholars from around the world. Established in 1998, IZA is supported by the Deutsche Post Foundation and affiliated with the University of Bonn.”
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