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In recent days, reports of a coronavirus cluster in Provincetown, Massachusetts have become a real-world lesson in not taking the Delta variant of the coronavirus seriously enough, even when people are vaccinated. More than 800 people have been infected, with cases resulting from the July 4 festivities in the Cape Cod resort community reaching as far as Minnesota.
At first it looks like a revival of last summer’s Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota. The hundreds of thousands of people who gathered there, most of them without a mask, subsequently spread the coronavirus across the country, accounting for thousands of cases in early fall 2020.
But aside from the magnitude, there is a crucial difference between Provincetown today and Sturgis then, one that calls into question the true severity of the Provincetown outbreak. Although hundreds have been infected, none have died and very few have been hospitalized: seven of what had become a total of 833 cases as of Wednesday evening.
While the outbreak has raised concerns about “groundbreaking cases” among those vaccinated, the story of Provincetown can be just as easily seen as one of science triumphing over the coronavirus.
“The vaccines work,” City Manager Alex Morse told Yahoo News. He noted that only 5.9% of coronavirus tests came back positive that day, compared to a maximum of 15% positivity. “Day by day, things are improving,” he concluded, saying that the city’s reimposition of a mask mandate, however unwelcome it may have been, has contributed to this improvement.
He also provided important context on the positive cases from Provincetown: Morse said about 70% of cases were symptomatic, but those symptoms were usually mild. “We haven’t seen a peak in hospitalizations,” he said.
More importantly, none of the seven hospitalized COVID-19 patients died.
While any outbreak is “of course tragic,” says Washington, DC internist Dr Lucy McBride, it “demonstrates the potency of COVID vaccines,” which ensured that the overwhelming majority of Provincetown cases were either benign or asymptomatic.
The cluster is, as McBride puts it, “a stark reminder of the critical importance of getting vaccinated”.
Located on the edge of Cape Cod, Provincetown is arguably the most famous gay resort in the country. The legacy of AIDS / HIV runs deep in the city’s psyche.
“Provincetown has one of the highest vaccination rates in the Commonwealth [of Massachusetts], with almost all residents aged 12 and over fully immunized, ”notes a city public health website. Massachusetts, in turn, is the second most vaccinated state in the country, after Vermont. (A calculation places the vaccination rate in Provincetown at 114%, although that inflated figure includes visitors vaccinated from out of town, which more than makes up for the small percentage of residents who are not vaccinated.)
High vaccination rates seemed to give Provincetown permission to do what it does best during the summer months: party. The warm weather turns the charming sleepy village into a more colorful and inclusive version of Bourbon Street.
Thousands of visitors flocked to the bars and restaurants of Commercial Street over the 4th of July weekend, which tends to usher in a particularly festive month in Ptown, as the locals affectionately call the place.
The cluster was first a rumor in the city, then a local news item, then a national title. A first report appeared in the Washington Blade, a gay newspaper published in the District of Columbia. “Dozens of positive tests for the virus after a weekend getaway,” a July 14 article said. Like all subsequent reports, he noted that most of those who tested positive after returning from Provincetown had been vaccinated.
The coronavirus was initially highly transmissible, and Delta is exceptionally so. Dozens quickly grew into hundreds. “The Provincetown cluster now has at least 430 cases, officials say,” a Provincetown Independent headline said on July 17.
“I had the impression that we were done with Covid, and we are not done,” lamented a local official. It was a common refrain. Provincetown was a warning that the pandemic was not over, that President Biden’s declaration of “independence” from the coronavirus, issued by the White House on July 4, was flawed and premature.
“We rushed to get back to normal a little too quickly,” said a Bostonian named Travis Dagenais, who visited Provincetown for Independence Day weekend and contracted COVID-19 there, on the public radio show On Point. He described a carefree attitude before the pandemic that he said in retrospect was not justified.
Dagenais was fully vaccinated, as were about 74% of the 833 people in what became the Provincetown cluster, according to Morse, the city manager (about 300 of those cases were people outside of Provincetown). Such breakthrough infections are rare, but can occur, especially with the Delta variant, which reproduces more vigorously than other versions of the coronavirus pathogen.
The main goal of public health officials is to keep people away from hospitals, and vaccines are very effective in this regard. Earlier this month, the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr Rochelle Walensky, revealed that among those who died from COVID-19 during the month of June, 99.5% had not been vaccinated .
City and state officials responded quickly, advising people to wear masks last week. By the end of that week, those guidelines had become a mandate for universal masking in interior spaces. The move reflected growing recognition across the country that the Delta variant needed more attention. Earlier this week, the CDC said that in places with high and significant viral transmission, even those vaccinated should wear masks. The new guidelines were a setback for a country that believed it was close to the end of the pandemic.
The Provincetown case seems to show above all that vaccines are doing their job. “The power of vaccines lies in their ability to prevent serious illness and death,” says Dr. Monica Gandhi, infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco. “In fact, vaccines are showing incredible persistence in achieving this goal, as evidenced by this great epidemic.”
Nationally, Gandhi says, 0.002% of those vaccinated have experienced severe breakthrough cases.
For Dr Jayanta Bhattacharya, a Stanford health economist who has taken unconventional positions on the virus, the story of groundbreaking cases and a pandemic flashback is the wrong one. “They are wasting the chance to declare a great victory,” he said of the Biden administration. “They really did a great job deploying the vaccine to protect vulnerable people. At the same time, he doesn’t understand why some Republicans slander the same vaccines that will spell the end of the pandemic.
As for Provincetown, things are returning to normal. People are out for family week, Morse told Yahoo News. “Ptown is still a very vibrant place,” he said.
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