While the overwhelming amount of electronic music promoters has understood the urgency and importance of putting a halt to all events until further notice in order to stop the spread of the COVID-19 Coronavirus, we have come across a minority of irresponsible, selfish, money-driven promoters defying Federal, State and City orders by continuing to throw parties here in the United States. The risk? Becoming a nationwide Coronavirus spreader.
This type of senseless behavior is not only abhorrent, but extremely short-sighted too.
Ultimately, the more we come together now the more we will be separated in the months to come. If we were able to freeze everyone in the world 6 feet apart from others they don’t live with for the next 14 days we would have beat COVID-19, and while that is unrealistic, getting as close to that as possible is the entire goal of the various lockdown and stay-at-home policies Government officials are implementing around the globe.
Some promoters claim their party is not going to have a negative effect on the spread of the virus, going so far as to call people “pussies” for thinking otherwise and using that as a promotion tactic.
This kind of rhetoric is, as we stated, not only disgusting in principle but it puts lives at risk! If even one attendee is COVID-19 positive the gathering risks to become a nationwide Coronavirus spreader with ramifications well beyond the attendees of the party.
Let the following real-life example be an illustration of what can happen when one asymptomatic COVID-19 positive individual attends a 50-person event.
It was March 5th when about 50 people got together at a home in the stately suburb of Westport, Connecticut. Why? A simple birthday party to toast the hostess on her 40th birthday and greet old friends, including one visiting from South Africa. They laughed, share stories, enjoyed a lavish buffet and… also shared the Coronavirus.
When the party was over they all returned to their lives. This Westport evening party became the Party zero in southwestern Connecticut and beyond, all thanks to the interconnectedness of the world we live in today. The partygoers — more than half of whom are now infected — left that evening for Johannesburg, New York City, and other parts of Connecticut and the United States, bringing the COVID-19 Coronavirus with them.
Fast forward to yesterday and Westport, a town of 28,000 on the Long Island Sound, now has 85 COVID-19 cases on their hands, when they had registered none before the March 5th party. did not have a single known case of the coronavirus on the day of the party. At a news conference Monday afternoon, Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont said that 415 people in the state were infected, up from 327 on Sunday night. Ten people have died. Westport, with less than 1% of the state’s population, now makes up more than one-fifth of its COVID-19 infections with its 85 cases. Fairfield County, where Westport is, has 270 cases, 65% of the total.
Yahoo! News reports: “Science cannot definitively link those escalating numbers to New York, which now accounts for about half of the coronavirus infections in the United States. But the Westport soirée ‘may be an example of the kind of thing we call a super-spreading event,’ said William Hanage, an associate professor of epidemiology at Harvard, especially since some of the partygoers later atten