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The highly transmissible variant of the Delta coronavirus passed through an Oklahoma gymnasium earlier this year, infecting dozens of teenagers, landing an unvaccinated person in intensive care and starkly reminding that the fight against COVID-19 is far from over. be completed.
Low COVID vaccination rates, the highly transmissible variant and worryingly lax social distancing rules at the facility have combined to fuel the outbreak, according to a CDC report.
The report not only highlights the continued risk to children – who are only approved for the vaccine if they are over 12 – but also the consequences of pandemic fatigue and slow vaccination rates in Oklahoma, where under 40 percent of the population has been vaccinated. . At the time of the gym outbreak, it was below 25 percent.
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“It’s almost like it’s two Americas,” Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, recently told CNN.
“When you have such a low level of immunization superimposed on a variant that has a high degree of spreading efficiency, what you’re going to see among under-vaccinated areas, whether it’s states, cities, or counties, you go see these typical blip individuals.
The Oklahoma outbreak most likely began in early April, when one or more gymnasts or staff had an undetected case of COVID.
In mid-May, lab workers informed Oklahoma state health officials that they had detected 21 specimens of Delta clustered in central Oklahoma.
Public health surveillance data indicated the cases were associated with the local gymnastics facility, according to the CDC report, which does not name the facility.
A full investigation has started, with health officials interviewing the 21 people and conducting contact tracing. They obtained a list of gymnasts and staff, as well as a calendar of gymnastics training sessions and competitions, which revealed that four gymnasts had made it to two competitions in other states while they were contagious. Investigators scoured the web for the results of these meetings to identify other possible contacts.
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By the end of May, they had traced 47 cases of COVID-19 to the outbreak – 23 gymnasts, three staff and 21 of their family contacts.
The median age of those infected was 14, and the epidemic has affected people aged 5 to 58.
Fortunately, investigators found no secondary spread among Oklahoma gymnasts attending out-of-state meets.
But worryingly, only four of those 47 people were fully vaccinated and two adults, both unvaccinated, ended up in hospital.
While adolescents were not eligible to receive the vaccine at the time of the outbreak, there were 13 people who contracted the virus which have been eligible.
And of the 194 people identified as at risk of the outbreak, 74 were eligible to receive the vaccine, but the vast majority of them had not done so.
The report also highlighted several questionable practices in the gymnasium that could have accelerated the outbreak, such as failure to follow quarantine and testing guidelines, failure to use masks among gymnasts, and people sweeping the floors. possible cases because they had only mild symptoms.
The facility had a policy of forcing people to wear masks if they were not active participants, but “this policy was not always followed,” the report said.
The facility also had poor ventilation, staff members walking through different groups of people, low COVID-19 vaccination rates that were only “partly related to age eligibility”, inadequate cleaning of high contact surfaces and mixing between class groups.
The outbreak foreshadowed the aggressive spread of the Delta variant, which now accounts for more than half of all COVID cases in the United States and is once again skyrocketing cases in 24 states.
“It is quite predictable that the United States will see outbreaks, especially in states with relatively low immunization coverage,” Lawrence Gostin, a global health expert from Georgetown University, told The Daily Beast. earlier this week.
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