COVID-19 cases among attendees at the White House Correspondents Dinner last weekend are mounting, highlighting the continued threat of the virus as cases rise nationally.
High-profile cases following the dinner include ABC reporter Jonathan Karl, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and reporters from The Washington Post, Voice of America, and other outlets.
There is no exact count, and it is not clear which dinner attendees contracted the virus at the dinner itself or at one of the many parties last weekend surrounding it.
But the string of reported cases does emphasize the point that even as the country seeks to move on from the virus, large indoor gatherings do carry some risk.
The cases have also played into an ongoing debate, with some arguing that the current era of COVID-19 allows vaccinated and boosted people to decide to attend large gatherings even if it means a small risk, while others are more cautious, pointing to the downstream effects on other people of increased transmission.
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The dinner did require that all attendees test negative the day of attendance and that they be vaccinated. But those measures were not always in place at the surrounding parties that weekend.
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Leana Wen, a public health professor at George Washington University, wrote in The Washington Post last month after another string of cases after a different DC gathering, the Gridiron Dinner, that the event “shows what living with covid-19 looks like.”
She noted on Friday that the Correspondents Dinner had testing and vaccination requirements, so some of the cases could have come from surrounding events that did not have those precautions.
More broadly, she said, referring to vaccinations and new treatments like the highly-effective Pfizer treatment Paxlovid, “we have tools that allow us to continue the social activities that all of us as humans crave.”
“The key metric that we should be looking at here is are people getting severely ill,” she added.
There are no reports so far of any dinner attendees being hospitalized.
Attendees at the White House Correspondents Dinner are generally privileged and well-connected people, who have much better access to treatments like Paxlovid, as well as paid time off and other benefits, than some Americans.
The nature of a highly-infectious disease like COVID-19 is that cases from the dinner will not stop there, and people can transmit the virus onto others.
“It’s not about the people who are at the event,” said Walid Gellad, a professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. “What you do impacts what happens to other people.”
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- Discussion
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COVID-19 cases climb after White House media dinner https://t.co/blyctPta5Q pic.twitter.com/SPEzYX5TGK
— The Hill (@thehill) May 8, 2022
Indoors, no masks and probably most of the attendees weren’t vaxed. What could possibly go wrong?
Precautions have been discarded. Of course, there will be an increase in cases. Thank you, anti-vaxers.
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