Sanjay Gupta Breaks Down Potential for 800-1,000 Attendees Catching Covid at Trump Rally: ‘Recipe for a Super Spreader Event’
CNN’s chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta broke down the possible risk potential for the spread of Covid-19 at the upcoming Trump campaign rally, detailing how just a few dozen positive cases could infect as many as 1,000 during a prolonged rally in an indoor arena with little mask wearing and no social distancing.
Gupta appeared on CNN’s Erin Burnett Out Front on Friday to offer further explanation of a column he wrote for CNN that warned the indoor Trump campaign rally was a “recipe for a super spreader event.” Currently, Oklahoma is one of 20 states with increasing coronavirus spread and it just registered a record high number of 450 new daily positive cases on Thursday, nearly double the number from just two days earlier. Neighboring states of Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas are also currently experiencing surges in coronavirus.
“You only need 20 [people] to shed a significant amount of the virus,” Burnett noted of Gupta’s risk analysis. “They could infect 1,000 other people and it could spread even further. How risky is a rally like this?”
“We keep talking about these things are risky and I realize as we’ve been reporting on this that that means different things to different people. Giving context I thought was important,” Gupta explained. “You have a 20,000-person arena, the question, first of all, is how many people are likely to show up infected.”
Gupta theorized that 0.5% of the attendees — or roughly 100 people — at Saturday’s rally could be carrying the infection. But he noted that many of those people could be asymptomatic, meaning the temperature checks the campaign is putting in place at the entrances won’t identify them as a risk and bar them from entering.
“Now, out of the people that show up, it’s usually about 20% of people that are responsible for the vast majority of spread,” Gupta pointed out. “Out of those 100 people, 20 people may be spreaders as you pointed out. Given the environment — inside, close quarters, long duration next to people, masks obviously not mandatory, lots of virus being expelled into the environment — what is the risk then? How many people will each person spread it to? We find they can spread it to 40 or 50 people in an environment like that, 20 people spreading it to 40 or 50 people each, 800 to 1,000 people now could become infected at an event like this. They then go home and potentially spread to family members or community members. We’re seeing the anatomy of an outbreak here. But I wanted to really quantify the risk for people. There’s a good chance people may walk in there uninfected and walk out infected.”
Watch the video above, via CNN.
