Get ready for another surge in nationwide COVID-19 cases as South Dakota’s favorite superspreader event, the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, kicks off Friday because sure, why not, being in a pandemic is so boring so let’s have 700,000 people crowd into small-town bars and spit in each other’s mouths or whatever it is they’ve come to do.

Will there be masks? Well, there weren’t last year. Proof of vaccinations? Don’t be ridiculous. Will there be social dista—ha, sorry, couldn’t finish that one. Last year’s Sturgis rally was later determined to have spread the virus around the country, though whether the number of victims was only in the hundreds or was in the hundreds of thousands depends on how you do the counting.

This year’s event will feature a new featured act: The delta variant of COVID-19, a bug that didn’t exist during last year’s superspreader gathering and that transmits more easily than previous versions. This year’s rally is happening with the full backing of South Dakota governor and would-be Mt. Rushmore refurbisher Kristi Noem. Noem has been competing for post-Trump presidential relevance with other superspreading governors like Greg Abbott and plague rat Ron DeSantis, who are part of a set of Republican governors who followed Trump’s lead in insisting that the pandemic that would go on to kill half a million Americans by the end of Trump’s watch was being overblown by Republicanism’s enemies.

This should not be used as an opportunity to bash American biker culture. Many, many motorcycle owners are good, decent, responsible people, even if they statistically tend to be good, decent, responsible people for a shorter span of years than the American average. It should absolutely be used to bash South Dakota officials who have been encouraging the rally to go forward, again, rather than give up the tourism dollars involved.

There’s really not much more to say about this one. It’s happening, it’s happening with not even as many of the weak restrictions that other irresponsible public gatherings have attempted to abide by during a new. COVID. Surge. It is absolutely assured to be a superspreader event, bringing cases back to whichever towns the assembled rallygoers come from, which will then make it everybody else’s problem.

Look, there’s no question that everyone is very, very tired of having to do things to try to halt a pandemic that would already have been in its dwindling stages if even less patient people had done the things they were supposed to have done already. We all get it. We all have something that we want to get back to; there are very few people who like wearing masks to the grocery store or in the post office. But these are all very minor sacrifices, all told, in order to keep children under 12, people who can’t be immunized, and everyone else safe from a virus that has wiped out 600,000 Americans and isn’t stopping yet.

The biggest pandemic danger comes from entitled Americans believing their entertainment is more important than other people’s lives. They are often goaded into feeling that way by Fox News hosts and other wealthy self-promoters who insist that the people who are dying are people who pretty much deserved it for one reason or another, and represent no big loss. But all we have to do, as Americans, is not be raging sociopathic assholes at each other for any six-week span of time and the virus would burn itself out for lack of hosts.

Instead, no, we have to do the mouth-spitting thing. And wave flags around while doing it, for some reason. Uuuuuugh.