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It was to be remembered as a fond celebration in midsummer in the quaint little town of Millinocket, Maine. But this marriage culminated in seven deaths and at least 177 people infected by coronavirus.
One of the reasons for this party that ended in tragedy is that the wedding guests on August 7th were Sixty-five, more than the maximum allowed of 50 people. First they attended a ceremony at a Baptist church, and then a reception at the Big Moose Inn, both near Millinocket, a town of 4,000 people.
Ten days later 24 people linked to the marriage tested positive to covid-19, and the Maine Center for Disease Control opened an investigation.
The director of the Center, Nirav Shah, informed on Thursday in a press conference that as a result of the marriage there were at least 177 infected people. Seven died, although “none were physically present at the party.”
The “detectives” trying to find everyone who came into contact with infected people linked the marriage to several outbreaks of the virus throughout the state of Maine, on the border with Canada.
A total of 39 cases and six deaths occurred in a nursing home 160 km from Millinocket, more than 80 cases were identified in a prison 370 km from the place of the wedding – one of the guards attended the marriage – and there are 10 probable cases in a Baptist church in the same region.
For Maine, which initially had very strict confinement and social distancing rules, but later relaxed them due to its very low infection rate, what happened was a reminder that you cannot lower your guard against the virus.
“When we found out what happened, everyone went into quarantine again (…) Everything closed in the town,” Cody McEwen, president of the city council, told AFP.
Imprudence
Some townspeople are furious with the wedding organizers, starting with the shelter where it took place, and whose authorization was temporarily suspended.
“They shouldn’t have organized that wedding. They should have been limited to 50 people, ”deplored Nina Obrikis, a member of the local Baptist church. “Now we can’t go anywhere, we can’t do anything.”
Maine Gov. Janet Mills issued a warning Thursday to the 1.3 million residents of this highly rural small state, whose contagion rate stands at 0.6%.
This increase in cases “threatens to ruin the progress made” in the face of the pandemic, he said. “We are not on the other side of the covid-19 tunnel, the virus is in our gardens,” he said.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, a series of events are linked to the origin of an exponential number of cases. The first in the United States were a biotechnology conference in Boston in February, where about 175 people participated, and a burial in Georgia where more than 100 people were infected with the virus.
In recent weeks there have been several outbreaks, especially on university campuses as a result of parties. Some colleges have had to close their doors and send students home.
At Oneonta University in upstate New York, more than 670 cases were detected in one month.
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