Amidst the coronavirus pandemic, Daytona Beach announced the city’s annual Bike Week event. It is expected that tens of thousands of motorcyclists will gather for the highly anticipated rally.
The city administration has allowed 60% indoor capacity permits to the local bars and other vendors to boost their business during the festive week. It has also granted permission for necessary outdoor sales and entertainment while maintaining the prescribed SOPs.
The annual Bike Week usually attracts approximately 500,000 bikers, but this year the Daytona Regional Chamber of Commerce is expecting to have 300,000 to 400,000 motorcyclists joining them. The number of bikers is less than usual because of the COVID-19 concerns. Apart from that, the ongoing economic crisis has also resulted in a lesser number of bikers participating in Bike Week.
The city officials are really hoping that they will be able to dodge the coronavirus outbreak and the event will proceed as planned. A similar event last year at Sturgis, South Dakota resulted in an unprecedented surge in the number of positive coronavirus cases. A motorcycle rally organized in August last year saw 1.9 million new coronavirus cases. More than 266,000 people were affected by a coronavirus in a 10-day long event while another 460,000 became asymptomatic carriers.
The health officials have voiced their concerns about the Bike Week event being organized just ahead of the spring break which attracts a number of state college students to hit the beach, which may trigger the COVID-19 spread. The Bike Week has been announced during the time when most of the states have begun to relax their coronavirus restrictions and ease the mandatory regulations imposed to curtail the novel coronavirus.
New COVID-19 variants, which are termed to be ‘more deadly’ as compared to the parent coronavirus, have been discovered across the country. Strains identified in South Africa and the United Kingdom are fast becoming the sole reason for the resurgence of the novel coronavirus in the United States.
Americans need to stay vigilant on their own to save themselves from getting infected.
