Mardi Gras 2020 led to 50K coronavirus cases, study finds
'It’s basically the snowball. Once it’s going, it’s just going. It’s really hard to stop.'
A new study on the initial outbreak of the coronavirus in New Orleans has found that last year’s Mardi Gras was responsible for tens of thousands of confirmed cases.
Public health officials from the U.S. and abroad believe a single person traveling from Texas brought the virus to the city weeks before the annual event. In a report released on Monday, researchers at the Scripps Research Institute, Tulane University, noted that nearly 800 people contracted the potentially deadly virus by the end of the festivities on Feb. 25, and those individuals went on to trigger a surge in cases with a reported 50,000 confirmed infections, Nola.com reports.
Read More: Mardi Gras 2021 canceled due to COVID-19, NOLA mayor says
“The entire outbreak in Louisiana is almost certainly fueled by what happened on Mardi Gras,” said Mark Zeller, one of the authors of the study.
“It’s basically the snowball. Once it’s going, it’s just going. It’s really hard to stop,” added Zeller.
The study, entitled “Emergence of an early SARS-CoV-2 epidemic in the United States,” examined the impact of “superspreading events” and how large gatherings accelerated the contagion locally and regionally.
The study cited evidence that Mardi Gras “may have accelerated the early COVID-19 epidemic in Louisiana.”
“Although we found that SARS-CoV-2 likely began spreading in New Orleans mid-February, 2020, the first official COVID-19 case was not reported until March 9th. This suggests that SARS-CoV-2 was likely spreading undetected and unmitigated during the large-scale gathering of people during Mardi Gras,” researchers wrote.
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“In March, I think New Orleans had the sharpest increase of patients anywhere in the world,” said Zeller. “If Mardi Gras would have been two, three weeks earlier, maybe it wouldn’t have resulted in this many cases,” he added.
theGRIO previously reported, Mardi Gras 2021 has been canceled. Well, at least the parades on Bourbon Street in New Orleans will be canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic.
“I want to be very clear. Mardi Gras 2021 is not canceled. It is going to look different. The mayor has been very consistent about saying that at every stage,” said Beau Tidwell, communications director for New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell, during a Tuesday press conference.
This year’s Fat Tuesday observation falls on Feb. 16, 2021.
The Mardi Gras 2021 FAQ page, notes that “Parades of any kind will not be permitted this year because large gatherings have proven to be super spreader events of the COVID-19 virus.”
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