Q&A of the Day – How many COVID cases are attributed to Spring Break?
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Today’s entry: The spring break virus stories are being hyped again. I never heard anything conclusive about how many people really spread the virus on the beach. Was there anything conclusive or all just suspected?
Bottom Line: Yeah, there’s no doubt last year’s Spring Break contributed to the spread of COVID and there are two specific studies recognized by the CDC which gave us an idea of the extent of it. The first study involved students traveling from the University of Texas at Austin to Cabo for Spring Break. Of 183 students in the travel party, 60 were found to have contracted COVID on the trip. Those 60 infected individuals led to an additional 4 cases with people they came in contact with according to contract tracers. It’s a small sample with specific circumstances but it provides an idea of how pervasive the spread was within that control group with about a third of the travel party contracting the virus and four additional people contracting it from them. The most interesting – which specifically studied spring breakers in Florida, was conducted by Ball State University’s Paul Niekamp and the Federal Reserve’s Daniel Mangrum. Here’s a summation statement from their study: Counties with more early spring break students had a higher growth rate of cases than counties with fewer early spring break students. The increase in case growth rates peaked two weeks after spring break. Effects are larger for universities with students more likely to travel through airports, to New York City, and to popular Florida destinations. What specifically did they find?
Their study included the activity of 7.5 million students across 1,326 schools. What they found is that counties where these students traveled had an average of 20% more COVID cases after two weeks than like communities where spring breakers didn’t travel. Additionally, they found the ambient spread of the virus didn’t peak from these students until five weeks after they’d returned home. In other words, if a student on spring break contracted the virus, the impact of their spread locally wouldn’t have run its course for five weeks and there were an average of 20% more cases than there would have been if not for these students. The most impacted city in the country was New York. The most impacted state was Florida.
Based on their study we can approximate the total number of cases in Florida which could be attributed to last’s years Spring Break at 11,428. One of the potential misconceptions regarding Spring Break spread is how it happened. Rather than widespread beach spread of the virus – which we were somewhat led to think based on pics of beach parties – it was largely a result of aggregating together while traveling. That’s an important distinction as images of beachgoers were often made to be viewed as being responsible for spreading the virus. That misconception also contributed to the closures of beaches by local governments. As we’ve learned, being outside is largely safe, as was most recently evidenced by the lack of spread in Tampa related to the Super Bowl. In the case of spring breakers – it's generally not what happens at the beaches you have to be concerned about – it's what’s happening when they're not on the beaches that’s potentially risky.
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