As of Wednesday, September 2, 2020, Montana reports 7,691 confirmed COVID-19 cases, with 183 new cases reported in the last day: 82 in Yellowstone County, 31 in Rosebud County, 15 in Flathead County, 13 in Big Horn County, 9 in Gallatin County and Sweet Grass County, 6 in Cascade County, 3 in each of Glacier, Hill, and Wibaux Counties, 2 in each of Carbon, Musselshell, Phillips, Richland, and Sanders Counties, and 1 in each of nine more Montana counties: Beaverhead, Deer Lodge, Garfield, Lake, Lewis & Clark, Liberty, Park, Roosevelt, and Toole Counties. Statewide, 461 people have been hospitalized, and 150 are being treated in Montana hospitals for COVID-19. Yellowstone County has had 2,166 cases so far. Gallatin County has had 1,086. The number of active coronavirus cases in Montana is 1,998. The most active cases are in Yellowstone County, with 955 active cases. Gallatin County has 45. 109 people have died in Montana of COVID-19. Nationwide, more than 185,000 Americans have died. There have been 6,090,000 cases of coronavirus in the US, and counting.

A Minnesota man who rumbled into South Dakota last month with thousands of other bikers for the annual Sturgis motorcycle rally was reported dead Wednesday of COVID-19. The man, in his 60s was hospitalized and in the intensive care unit after returning from Sturgis. His death is the first traced to the 10-day event that attracted more than 400,000 people and has revved up the coronavirus crisis across the region. Some 260 cases across 11 states had already been recorded before the first death linked to the Sturgis motorcycle rally, a sometimes raucous event that ran from Aug. 7 through 16 during which the bars were packed and where there was barely any attempt made at social distancing, let alone wearing masks. Since then, the number of coronavirus cases have doubled in South Dakota and there has been an uptick in new cases being reported in neighboring North Dakota, Iowa, Minnesota and Nebraska as well. But it’s not just the bikers who appear to be driving the spike in new cases, said an epidemiologist at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Dr. Sadiya Khan said two things clearly appear to be driving the spike in cases: the motorcycle rally in Sturgis, as well as students returning to colleges and universities. Khan said that the rally appears to have been a “superspreader event.”

Two faculty members at Park High School in Livingston are quarantined at home after testing positive for COVID-19. The Park County Health Department, with help from the Livingston School District, is doing contact tracing, which found another positive case Wednesday. Contact tracing is ongoing. A student in second grade in Shelby has tested positive for COVID-19. Health workers have contacted and quarantined close contacts of the patient.

Old Navy will pay its employees to be poll workers on Election Day. The San Francisco-based company, which employs more than 50,000 people, will pay a full day’s pay to its employees on top of what election judges normally earn from local election boards. It’s part of a broader partnership with Civic Alliance and Power the Polls aimed at recruiting 250,000 poll workers.

This past Sunday, airline pilots reported seeing ‘a guy in a jetpack’ flying 3,000 feet over Los Angeles. Two pilots on two different flights reported seeing a man in a jetpack thousands of feet in the air above Los Angeles on Sunday. An American Airlines pilot was approaching Los Angeles International Airport, LAX, at around 6:30 p.m. when he called in the sighting to air-traffic control. The unidentified flying person was at the plane’s altitude, the pilot said, about 3,000 feet in the air. “Tower, American 1997. We just passed a guy in a jetpack,” the pilot said. “Only in LA,” an unidentified person said in the audio log. Another pilot, on a Southwest Airlines flight, also reported seeing the guy in a jetpack and air-traffic controllers radioed to another airline crew to warn them.