An August wedding at a lodge near Millinocket, Maine has been linked to 175 coronavirus cases as well as seven deaths; all the fatalities were people who did not attend the wedding but who were infected by guests or contacts of guests, the Washington Post reports.
The 65-person wedding, which didn’t adhere to masking or social distance guidelines, was linked to six deaths at a Maplecrest Rehabilitation and Living Center in Madison, Maine; no one at the center or who worked at the center attended the wedding, according to the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention Tuesday.
The super-spreader event illustrates how easily the coronavirus can spread, particularly among people who were not directly connected to the events. Attendees at other potential super-spreader events, such as the Sturgis motorcycle rally, are currently being tracked as they return to their homes and communities.
“It’s a real cautionary tale that even in a relatively rural area in Maine that there was still fuel for a fire to erupt,” Thomas Tsai, an assistant professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told The Post.