After California issued a safer-at-home order in March, a “large number” of extended family and friends met up in Pasadena to hold a birthday party in mid-April. That birthday party, held at a private residence, according to the Pasadena Public Health Department, is being credited with creating a cluster of five confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus, and “many more ill individuals” whose tests have not been reported yet, as reported by the Los Angeles Times. According to officials, the health department used contact tracing to get back to the party. The other notable point about this party? One family member who attended the party reportedly joked about having the virus and was coughing without a face mask. Most people who attended reportedly did not wear masks either.
"No social distancing, face covering or masks," Lisa Derderian, a spokesperson for the city, told NBC News in an email interview. Contact tracing worked in this case because positive COVID-19 cases must be reported to the health department. From there, the agency works to identify who may have been exposed. Those people can then isolate, which helps to curb an even bigger outbreak. So, more tests is one key step. Contact tracing (which includes hiring and training enough people for each state, plus Puerto Rico and D.C.) is an equally important and related step.
As Dr. Matthew Feaster, PPHD epidemiologist noted in the press release, this birthday party is actually an example of how “good contact tracing can identify disease clusters and tell us more about the spread of disease in our community.” Unfortunately, not every city or state is giving as much funding and resource to contact tracing efforts. For example, Tennessee State Representative Mike Stewart, a Democrat, is concerned that the state isn’t hiring nearly enough people for contact tracing to be effective.
”Why aren't we treating this like an emergency, which it is. Someone could get COVID-19, go into a nursing home and, inadvertently, kill 20 people,” he stated to local outlet Fox 17 Nashville, adding that the state needs a fully trained staff of at least 1,000 people for contact tracing to be as effective as possible. Right now, Tennessee has mostly volunteers.
If that makes you uneasy, one solution isn’t the most fun, but is pretty straight-forward: Stay home as much as possible, and don't meet up with friends or loved ones you aren’t already living with.
“Although we are moving forward with small modifications to the Safer at Home Order, gatherings of people who do not live in the same household are still prohibited,” Dr. Ying-Ying Goh said in a statement in the Pasadena health department’s news release.
Why is this story especially important now? As Mother’s Day (and Father’s Day, not too far after, in June), rolls around, people may be tempted to spend time with family. Especially as some states begin to let up on restrictions, people may feel a false sense of security that all is fine and safe. But as Derderian told NBC, that’s not the message people should be walking away with.
“Don’t give into guilt of physically seeing mom unless she’s physically been in your immediate household otherwise the guilt will be more extreme after the fact if mom or grandma be some ill,” she told the news outlet.
Of course, this birthday party in California isn’t the only time this has seemingly happened. As one radio host told CNN, she unknowingly contracted the coronavirus while covering the news in New Rochelle, New York. She tested positive after holding a birthday party for her mother, and believes she unwittingly infected people linked to the 90th birthday bash on March 8; six tested positive, and two others died, as she told the news outlet, noting at that point, “we did not know how quickly this virus spread” and that gatherings hadn’t yet been banned.
"If you don't want to social distance because it's making, you know, your life miserable, think about the people that you don't realize might have a compromised immune system," Alice Stockton-Rossini, a reporter for 710 WOR, told CNN in an interview in early April.