“We’ve seen pictures and photos and TV clips of people very much congregated, no masks, together on a boardwalk, on a beach, in a pool,” Fauci said during the interview with Howard Bauchner, editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Medical Association. “That has been and continues to be a concern to me. We’re not going to know what the effect of that is for at least a couple more weeks. It likely is three weeks or more. We need to wait and see.”
Before the protests, most so-called super-spreading events that have been tied to major outbreaks in the U.S. occurred among relatively small groups of people interacting inside.
A single infected person who attended choir practice on March 10 in Mount Vernon, Washington, just north of the location of the first cases in the U.S., infected 52 of the 61 people present. An employee at Biogen Inc. infected dozens of people while attending a company meeting in Boston in February, with those who picked up the pathogen spreading it to more than half a dozen other states.
How the virus spreads among people outdoors, however, is much less well understood. There was a super-spreader event at an Italian soccer match earlier this year. But elsewhere, large gatherings that have stirred fears of wider outbreaks haven't produced them. Protests in the U.S. at many statehouses against the lockdowns haven't—so far—produced large jumps in infection rates.
For now, many officials are trying first to halt the violence in the streets. While officials in place like Chicago and Minnesota have encouraged protesters to observe social distancing and even quarantine, most municipalities aren't visibly trying to trace contacts, push people to physically separate, or institute any other additional public-health surveillance.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.