- A marriage in Maine has been linked to 53 confirmed cases of coronavirus and counting.
- Nearly half of those cases consist of 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 venue is said to have exceeded the state’s inner border of 50 people.
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A wedding in Millinocket, Maine, has been linked to 53 confirmed cases of coronavirus, according to the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
That number includes a woman who did not attend the event but died Friday; officials believe she was later infected with a guest COVID-19, the Portland Press Herald reported.
Twenty-five people went to the Aug. 7 reception, which was for the most part inside, Maine’s CDC director Nirav Shah told a news conference on Thursday. Shah said the local, Big Moose Inn, exceeded the state’s limit on indoor meetings, which is 50 people.
The median age of known infected people during the outbreak is 42, but there is a wide range from 4 years old to 78, Shah said Thursday. Most of the people reported symptoms about four days after reception, but roughly 13% were asymptomatic, he added.
It is not the first time a celebration has been associated with a gloomy or non-lethal outcome.
In May, a birthday party in Pasadena, California, made national headlines when it was linked to the infection of at least five people, several of whom became seriously ill. The outbreak is thought to have started with a person attending the party without a face mask while coughing, officials said.
“She was joking with people at the birthday party,” Lisa Derderian, a Pasadena spokeswoman at the time, told CNN. “She said I might have COVID-19, and look and see, she did.”
In Millinocket, it is unclear whether guests wore masks. Nearly half – 23 – of the cases linked to the wedding are among people who did not attend, according to the Press Herald. Attempts to identify those in contact with infected people are still ongoing, said the Maine 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 obtaining test results in turn delay delays of infected people to stay at home.
In fact, the method is more suitable for states like Maine, which has a low overall infection rate. With 53 cases and counts linked to it, the Millinocket wedding is the second largest outbreak in the state 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.
