Superspreader events have kept the momentum of the COVID-19 pandemic rolling, especially as more transmissible variants spread across the U.S., experts told NBC News in a July 14 report.
Dozens of COVID-19 cases have been linked back to large events recently, including 125 cases that were tied to a church camp in South Texas in late June, and 85 cases traced back to an Illinois summer camp in mid-June, NBC reports.
In the early months of the pandemic in the U.S., superspreader events routinely made headlines, with researchers crediting such events as spurring further community transmission.
The spread of the delta variant, first detected in India and now the dominant U.S. strain, combined with the absence of safety measures like social distancing at such events heightens the risk. However, experts say not to discount the role human behavior plays.
"It's not just about the variants. It's also about how people are interacting," David Dowdy, MD, associate professor of infectious disease epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. "Right now, people are definitely distancing less, masking less, going to larger gatherings, and meanwhile, vaccination rates are not going up all that fast," he told NBC.
The effect that eliminating superspreader events could have on slowing the pandemic is largely overlooked, says Joshua Batson, PhD, chief data scientist at The Public Health Co., which uses technology to monitor and contain disease outbreaks.
"Mathematically, if you remove the superspreading events, we don't have a pandemic," Dr. Batson told NBC. "If you just concentrate on these scenarios where the really bad things happen, you'll have a disease that will kind of just sputter out."