Capitol Hill COVID-19 cases are just the tip of the iceberg

When thousands of insurgents descended on Washington, DC, from across the country in early January, it had the makings of a mass-market COVID-19 event: people crowded together, chanting and clapping, all unmasked. U.S. lawmakers have tested positive for the virus after the pro-Trump riots, and these cases could only be the tip of the iceberg. The surge in activity, which has snubbed all public health guidelines, could lead to epidemics in the city, in prisons and prisons, and across the country.

However, determining exactly the damage caused by the riots would be a huge epidemiological challenge. Tracking super-application events is difficult at the best of times. When the event is populated by people who are unlikely to cooperate with the authorities and the number of cases is already very high, this task becomes even more difficult.

“The whole of the United States is currently a very widespread event,” says Andrew Noymer, infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of California, Irvine.

Tracking the disease in the halls of Congress, where it affects public figures, is clearer: So far, six members of Congress have reported positive test results after the riots when they were forced to leave. cram into small rooms for safety. (A seventh tested positive on the day of the riots and was already infected while they were ongoing.) Three Democrats who have COVID-19 have explicitly blamed it on relatives and their fellow Republicans who refused to wear masks.

Outside the Capitol building, the disease was probably also circulating. Far-right groups who have rallied for the riots are not taking the pandemic seriously. “Part of the MAGA riot platform is a complete disavowal of science, public health, and the need for things like masks,” says Eric Reinhart, a researcher studying health and incarceration at the Department. anthropology from Harvard University.

Among the thousands of people who made their way to Washington, DC from across the country, people gathered outside without a mask, broke into the Capitol building without a mask, and returned to hotels, where they sitting unmasked in the halls. They risked spreading COVID-19 among themselves, but also to people they encountered in the city, including DC workers. Back home, they could also have sparked new outbreaks in their own communities.

COVID-19 is on the rise across the country, so everyone is at a higher risk of infection right now than they could have been at any other time in the past year . But because of their behavior, the rioters were perhaps more likely to be infected and spread the infection than the general population, says Reinhart.

This is one of the main differences between these riots and these protests against police brutality over the summer (which were also not violent and did not try to overthrow the democratic process). Most people did not come out to participate in these protests, but instead gathered where they lived, and the vast majority of protesters wore masks and were careful about keeping a distance. The main risks of COVID-19 during protests against police brutality came from police officers who led protesters into tight quarters and arrested thousands of people.

“People were taken in paddy wagons or big vans with ten, 20 or 50 people,” Reinhart explains. “Then they are held in enclosures in these prisons, often with 20 or 30 people in a confined space.”

In contrast, fewer than 100 people were arrested in or after leaving DC in connection with the Capitol Riot. For legal and public safety reasons, more arrests were likely justified, Reinhart says. But for public health, he was relieved to see such a small number.

“Thank goodness they’re not throwing thousands of people in jail in Washington and Virginia right now, because it would be an absolute disaster, not just for the inmates, but for everyone,” Reinhart says. COVID-19 spreads faster in neighborhoods near a prison or prison than outside. When the virus takes hold in one of these facilities, it also spreads to the surrounding community as the wardens arrive and return to their homes each day and people are brought in and released. In Illinois, people cycling in and outside the Cook County jail explained about 15% of COVID-19 cases in Chicago, according to research by Reinhart.

The small number of rioters arrested may have mitigated this element of public health risk after the riots. But diehard Trump supporters like those seen on Capitol Hill tend to be anti-masks and are less likely to follow public health guidelines than the general population. The odds that the few dozen rioters who were arrested have COVID-19 and bring it to jail may be higher than the typical incarcerated person. Even with lower numbers, it’s reasonable to assume rioters could pose a risk to jails and jails, Reinhart says.

It could be weeks before epidemiologists are able to piece together all the ramifications of the Capitol riots on the spread of COVID-19, if they do. It takes meticulous detective work to quantify the ripple effects of a rally, Noymer says. Researchers could use two strategies. One is to find the genetic sequence of the virus that infected someone who became ill after the riots, they could follow it by passing from person to person. This is how experts tracked the spread of the virus at a conference in Boston last year, finding that around 245,000 cases could be traced to this single event. This is unlikely to be a good strategy for rioting, as it depends on who at the event shows up and agrees to participate in the research. “Good luck getting these people to cooperate,” Noymer says.

Another strategy is to measure changes in the number of cases in an area before and after an event, and to model how much the event likely contributed to a change. This is the basis of a study analyzing the impact of a motorcycle rally in August in Sturgis, South Dakota, on the spread of COVID-19. The motorcycle rally happened when COVID-19 cases in the United States were much lower than they are now. Unraveling the reasons for the infections and finding bumps in the number of cases will be more difficult now after the Capitol riots where more than 200,000 cases are reported every day.

Neither method is perfect and both rely on modeling and estimation. Finding numbers can be a useful way to conceptualize the damage caused by an event like the riots on Capitol Hill, but it’s not the only way to know something bad has happened. The riots were clearly a significant event, and based on all public health measures, they likely spread COVID-19. Experts don’t need to quantify exactly how much he supercharged the spread of the virus to be convinced that it mattered and that it was dangerous. “We don’t need to try to put a number on it,” Noymer says. “It’s a fool’s race.”