Question: I saw that there was one person at that Lake of the Ozarks party that was clearly sick while he was there and began to show symptoms the day after. Do we know if anyone has fallen ill as a result of being exposed during that event? I’m super curious if the outside air/heat/pool made the virus harder to catch. And if there is no news on that event, do we have an reports of people at beaches falling ill 3–5 days afterwards and therefore were potentially exposed while at the beach?
Answer: I read that headline too, but I didn’t read further. Your question prompted me to do so, thanks! For those of you who didn’t read the story, the upshot is that a party-goer from Boone County, Missouri hung out in multiple, crowded bars on May 23–24 in Lake of the Ozarks (Camden County), MO. As the Camden County Department of Health reported on May 29th, the person “arrived here on Saturday [5/22] and developed illness on Sunday, so was likely incubating illness and possibly infectious at the time of the visit.”
In terms of transmission, it’s hard to answer your question because so many of the party-goers were from so many different places and there’s no solid contact tracing effort happening (to my knowledge). The local paper, KY3 just reported results from a cell phone tracking company, which uses anonymized cell phone location data to see where people disperse to from large gatherings, including Lake of the Ozarks during Memorial Day weekend. KY3 reports that “The data shows after the weekend was over, those blue dots, or cell phones, spread out all across the midwest. St. Louis, Kansas City, and Omaha, Nebraska saw a lot of activity…about 14 states that got some version of traffic.” All that said, to really know whether folks became infected from the party-goer, we’d need solid contact tracing data, which we don’t have.
Still, we could perhaps glean something from the data we do have, so let’s take a look. When it comes to Missouri as a whole, cases are on the rise. Yesterday, Missouri had the highest number of daily cases reported since the beginning of May (Figure 1). When it comes to Boone County, where the party-goer was from, Missouri is reporting a 25% increase(!) in cases over the last 7 days (increase from a total of 123 cases to 154 cases). When it comes to Camden County, where Lake of the Ozarks is, Missouri is reporting only 37 total cases, with only 1 new case in the last 14 days. Other places that party-goers seemed to have dispersed to — Omaha (rising cases), St. Louis (falling cases), and Kansas City (rising cases) — are seeing varying trends in the average number of reported cases over the past two weeks according to the NY Times county-level data aggregator. But trying to see how the virus may have spread by looking at these county-level data is really not that informative, especially since the places listed have quite large populations. Plus, Omaha, St. Louis and Kansas City were already hotspots. It is heartening to know that Camden County has not seen an increase in cases, while disheartening to see the massive increase in Boone Country.
When it comes to Spring Breakers, I read a number of news reports of students testing positive after partying at the beach during Spring Break, but I haven’t seen anything that showed the events were super-spreader events. So far, super-spreader events seem to happen in populous, indoor places — nightclubs in South Korea, conference in Boston, large dinner party in Connecticut, church events in Arkansas, choir practice in Washington, restaurant in China. One epidemiologist also noted that these crowded places also happen to be loud and speculated about the relationship between talking loudly/shouting/singing and increased spread. As I’ve said the old aphorism before, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. There’s still so much we don’t know about the virus.
Figure 1. Daily Cases in Missouri (data viz from NY Times)
