Several attendees of CRSSD Festival 2020 are likely to have been exposed to COVID-19. The exposures, likely the first in Southern California, happened before anyone could have expected it to. San Diego public health officer Dr. Wilma Wooten did not consider advising to stop this event on the weekend of March 7th because there were no confirmed cases of COVID-19. Now two people who attended the festival have tested positive for the virus. One was sick after attending the event, and the other had traveled to a country where the outbreak was actively occurring.
Dr. Eric McDonald, medical director of the county’s epidemiology and immunization services branch, said that contact-tracing investigations have found that a total of two people with known COVID-19 attended the concert. One was known to have traveled to a country where a coronavirus outbreak is ongoing while the second got sick after attending the event, he said. Given that it takes three to five days for symptoms to appear after infection, the executive said it is likely that the infection occurred before the event, not during it.
There was some discussion about whether or not the popular event should be allowed to occur given the increasing talk of the need for public health precautions and an outbreak raging in China. But, at the time, the county still hadn’t recorded a local COVID case, and Dr. Wilma Wooten, the county’s public health officer, said she didn’t feel such a step was yet necessary.
CRSSD Festival sent out an email to it’s attendees recently stating that were aware two people who attended the festival were tested positive for the virus.
“These individuals are believed to have contracted the virus outside of the festival, and currently no cases have been noted to originated from CRSSD.”
Sources say the former attendee was likely contagious before the event, since people can have the virus for several days without showing symptoms. At this point, it may be fair to assume that attending other events around the country this same weekend may have occurred. At this moment, there are 7,038 confirmed cases of the Coronavirus in the United States, with 97 deaths at the time this article was written.
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