Kristi Noem slams report Sturgis was superspreader event as ‘attack’ on personal freedom

Gov. Kristi Noem slammed a study that found that the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally was a “local & nationwide spreader of COVID-19.”

“This report isn’t science. It’s fiction. Under the guise of academic research, it’s nothing short of an attack on those who exercised their personal freedom to attend Sturgis,” Noem tweeted Tuesday.

“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,” Noem’s Twitter thread continued.

The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally was held from August 7-16 in South Dakota and was reported as an event that would facilitate “superspreading” the virus. Government officials reported that 124 people tested positive for the virus after attending the rally, and one man died of COVID-19.

Noem joined Fox & Friends on Wednesday to discuss the study and slammed it again as one built on fiction.

“What they did is they took a snapshot in time, and they did a lot of speculation, did some back of the napkin math, and made up some numbers and published them. This study wasn’t even done by a healthcare study. It was done by the Institute of Labor Economics, and it’s completely untrue. That’s what’s so frustrating is I know the media does not like what South Dakota has done. They have deemed me as the governor that made all the wrong decisions by letting my people have freedom, by using personal responsibility,” she said.

The IZA released the study this week and estimated that 266,000 cases of the coronavirus were tied to the event, sparking $12.2 billion in public health costs.

“The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally represents a situation where many of the ‘worst-case scenarios’ for superspreading occurred simultaneously: the event was prolonged, included individuals packed closely together, involved a large out-of-town population (a population that was orders of magnitude larger than the local population), and had low compliance with recommended infection countermeasures such as the use of masks,” the researchers found.

Researchers studied anonymous cellphone data and found “smartphone pings from non-residents” and “foot traffic at restaurants and bars, retail establishments, entertainment venues, hotels and campgrounds each rose substantially.”

“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,” Noem continued in her rebuke of the study. “I look forward to good journalists, credible academics, and honest citizens repudiating this nonsense.”