- A wedding in Maine has caused 53 confirmed cases of coronavirus and counts.
- Nearly half of these cases involve people who did not go to the wedding, Maine’s CDC reported.
- It is not clear if people wore masks at the event, but the location has exceeded the state’s inner border of 50 people.
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A wedding reception in Millinocket, Maine, led to 53 confirmed cases of coronavirus, according to the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
One woman who did not attend the event died on Friday after being infected with COVID-19 after coming into close contact with a guest, the Portland Press Herald reported.
Twenty-five people attended the Aug. 7 reception, which was largely indoors, said Maine’s CDI director Nirav Shah at a Aug. 20 press conference. The venue, “Big Moose Inn,” exceeded the state’s limit on indoor meetings, which is 50 people, Shah said.
The median age of infected people during the outbreak is 42, but there is a wide range from four years old to 78, Shah said on Thursday. Most of them reported symptoms about 4 days after reception, but roughly 13% were asymptomatic, he added.
It is not the first time that such a party ended, leading to a gloomy or non-lethal outcome.
In May, a California birthday party made headlines when it infected at least 5 people, several of whom became more seriously ill, a Pasadena Department of Public Health spokeswoman told Business Insider at the time.
The outbreak began with one person attending the party without a face mask while coughing in the air and joking about having COVID-19, officials said.
“She was joking with people at the birthday party,” Lisa Derderian, a Pasadena spokeswoman at the time, told CNN. “She said I had Covid-19 maybe, and look, and look, she did.”
In Millinocket, nearly half – 23 – of reported cases are linked to the wedding among non-attendees, according to the Press Herald. But efforts to contract tracks, or identify those in contact with infected people, are still ongoing, said Maine’s CDC.
Overall, contract tracing in the U.S. is not going well, The New York Times reported last month. In many scenarios, the virus runs rampant ahead of the efforts of researchers. In others, delays in getting test results in turn are delays in getting infected people to stay home.
In fact, the method is more suitable for states like Maine, which has a low overall infection rate. In 53 cases and counting, the Millinocket marriage is the state’s latest eruption to date, the Herald reported.
Elsewhere, these resources are better spent on things like site testing, helping schools prepare for reopening, and educating the public about masks and other preventative measures, public health officials told the Times.
“Contact tracking is the wrong tool for the wrong job at the wrong time,” said Drs. David Lakey, the former state health commissioner from Texas, in the Times report.
