US President Donald Trump will attend Friday’s Make America Great Again Rally in Georgia. Reports have indicated that there is a digital billboard near the site of the rally showing the words Trump COVID Superspreader event. The billboard was paid for by national nonprofit Rural America 2020. It is located on I-75S near Hartley Bridge Road and the Middle Georgia Regional Airport. Bibb County commissioner-elect Seth Clark also issued a statement about the billboard and said, “This billboard is a public service announcement. Nobody wants to see a superspreader event but that’s exactly what these rallies are becoming. By ignoring experts’ warning on distancing and masks the President and his campaign are flying from one location to the next and leaving COVID hotspots behind”.
Clark added, “We don’t need that in Georgia, particularly since our state has already seen well over 300,000 infections”. Rural America 2020 is a bipartisan nonprofit comprised of concerned rural leaders and farmers across multiple states. They claim they help educate and activate rural Americans on public policy issues that affect them, including in the area of agriculture. The head of Bibb County GOP, Calvin Palmer informed a news outlet that he was not worried and that there would be significantly more than 500 people there, but he would wear his mask to keep people safe around him. He estimated at least 20,000 people would show up for the rally.
A Georgia Tech professor, Joshua Weitz said that attendees should prepare for Friday’s rally knowing there is an almost certain risk someone there will have COVID-19. Weitz added that there is a 98% possibility someone will have the virus and could possibly spread it, with just a crowd size of 500. The Sheriff’s Office in Bibb County and the Trump campaign haven’t yet confirmed how many people are expected to attend the event. It is noteworthy that there were at least 12, 500 people inside and around 6,000 outside the event when Trump stopped at the Middle Georgia Regional Airport in 2018. Friday’s rally will be at the same airport, but not at the same hangar. A similar billboard appeared in Des Moines, Iowa, prior to a rally there on Wednesday night.