Many of the moralists who preach social distancing and bland obedience to mask mandates are college-educated hipsters, especially those on either the East or West Coasts.
Yet it was these very hipsters who attended a Burning Man-style festival in Mexico that turns out to have been a coronavirus ‘superspreader’ event, with several participants bringing COVID-19 back with them to New York City as a pathogenic souvenir.
Private COVID-19 testing company Checkmate Health Strategies said over half of its recent positive cases in the Big Apple were directly tied to the Art With Me event in Tulum, the Daily Beast reported.“I would say that 60 to 70 percent of my positives in the last couple weeks in New York City have been a direct result of either people coming back from Art With Me — or who have been directly exposed to someone who attended Art With Me,” said founder Eleonora Walczak.The four-day festival — which involves art workshops and group meditations by day and raging partying by night — took place as planned from Nov. 11 to 15 in COVID-ravaged Mexico.
Photos and videos posted online show dozens of people without masks attending parties linked to the beachfront festival, dancing and drinking the night away.
The festival posted multiple photos on its own Instagram of groups participating in what appeared to be meditation and yoga sessions. In those images, a handful of people could be seen wearing masks.The festival, which bills itself as an ‘immersive’ art and music event, has been likened to Burning Man.It is not yet clear exactly how many people in total attended the event but some of the parties tied to the festival had about 150 partygoers.
One New Yorker recounted an experience of a friend who became infected at the event.
Angelica, a New York City-based woman who asked Fox News not to reveal her last name, moved to Tulum during the pandemic and contracted the virus over the summer. She told Fox News a friend who went to the Art With Me parties became sick with virus symptoms back in New York.
“My friend was in Tulum on vacation during that time and she stayed in the hotel zone next to the festival,” Angelica said. “She did go to the parties and some installations. She already started feeling bad in Tulum and by the time she landed in New York City she had all the [COVID] symptoms: headaches, fever, diarrhea, weakness, loss of scent — practically every symptom on the list except shortness of breath. It lasted at least a week until she was better.”
I would be more sanguine about attendees making choices for themselves, regarding potential infection of a virus with normally mild symptoms and a very low mortality rate (especially for young adults). However, many New Yorkers are forced to shutter businesses due to absurd, politically-driven lockdown rules. This imported surge, especially around the 2020 Christmas season, could be fiscally deadly for those who can afford it the least.
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