When thousands of insurrectionists arrived in Washington, DC, from across the country in early January, they had the ingredients of a COVID-19 superspring event: people huddled in nearby rooms, singing and cheering, all unmasked. US lawmakers tested positive for the virus after the pro-Trump riots, and those cases may just be the tip of the iceberg. The outbreak of activity, which disregarded all public health guidelines, can lead to outbreaks in the city, in prisons and prisons, and across the country.
Finding out exactly how much damage the riots did, however, would be a huge epidemiological challenge. Tracking super spreader events is difficult in the best of circumstances. When the event is filled by people who are unlikely to cooperate with the authorities and the case count is already very high, the task becomes even more difficult.
“The entire United States is a widespread event at the moment,” says Andrew Noymer, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of California, Irvine.
Tracking the disease in the halls of Congress, where it strikes public figures, is clearer: so far, six members of Congress have reported positive test results after the disturbances, when they were forced to group together in small rooms for security. (A seventh tested positive on the day of the riots and was already infected as they continued.) Three Democrats who made COVID-19 explicitly blame neighbors and Republican colleagues who refused to wear masks.
Outside the Capitol building, the disease was probably circulating as well. The far-right groups that came together for the riots do not take the pandemic seriously. “Part of the MAGA riot platform is a complete rejection of science, public health and the need for things like masks,” says Eric Reinhart, a researcher who studies health and incarceration in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University.
Among the thousands who traveled to Washington, DC from across the country, people gathered outside without masks, stormed the Capitol building without masks and returned to hotels, where sat unmasked in the lobbies. They were at risk of spreading COVID-19 among them, but also to the people they met in the city, including DC workers. When they returned home, they may also have sown new outbreaks in their own communities.
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Photo by Tasos Katopodis / Getty Images
COVID-19 is emerging across the country, so everyone is at greater risk of infection now than at any time in the past year. But, because of their behavior, troublemakers were more likely to be infected and spread the infection than the general population, says Reinhart.
This is one of the main differences between these disturbances and protests against police brutality during the summer (which were also not violent and did not attempt to subvert the democratic process). Most people did not travel to participate in these protests, instead they met where they lived, and the vast majority of protesters wore masks and were cautious about keeping their distance. The main risks for COVID-19 in protests against police brutality came from police officers who channeled the protesters into cramped rooms and arrested thousands.
“People were taken in rice trucks or large vans with ten, 20 or 50 people,” says Reinhart. “So they are being held in bullpens in these prisons, usually with 20 or 30 people in a confined space.”
In contrast, less than 100 people were arrested on or after leaving DC in connection with the Capitol riot. For legal and public security reasons, more arrests were probably justified, says Reinhart. But for public health, he was relieved to see such a low number.
“Thank God, they are not throwing thousands of people into prisons in DC and Virginia right now, because that would be an absolute disaster, not just for the detainees, but for everyone,” says Reinhart. COVID-19 spreads more quickly around a prison or jail than outside. When the virus settles in one of these facilities, it also hits the surrounding community, as guards arrive and go home every day and people are brought in and released. In Illinois, people entering and leaving Cook County Jail explained about 15% of COVID-19 cases in Chicago, Reinhart’s research revealed.
The small number of arrested protesters may have mitigated this element of public health risk after the disturbances. But Trump’s hardline advocates, like those seen on Capitol Hill, tend to be anti-masking and are less likely to follow public health guidelines than the general population. The chances that the few dozen protesters who were arrested would have COVID-19 and take him to prison may be greater than the typical incarcerated person. Even with lower numbers, it is reasonable to speculate that troublemakers may be a risk to jail and prison, says Reinhart.
It may take weeks for epidemiologists to be able to piece together all the ramifications of Capitol riots in the spread of COVID-19, if they do. It takes meticulous detective work to quantify the spillover effects of a meeting, says Noymer. There are two strategies that researchers can use. One involves finding the genetic sequence of the virus that infected someone who became ill after the disorders, they could follow it as it passed from person to person. That’s how experts tracked the spread of the virus at a conference in Boston last year, finding about 245,000 cases that date back to a single event. It is unlikely to be a good strategy for disorders, as it depends on the people who were at the event to speak up and agree to participate in the research. “Good luck getting these people to cooperate,” says Noymer.
Another strategy is to measure changes in the number of cases in an area before and after an event and to model how much the event likely contributed to any change. This is the basis for a study that looks at the impact of a motorcycle rally in August in Sturgis, South Dakota, on the COVID-19 spread. The motorcycle rally came when COVID-19 cases in the United States were much smaller than they are now. Unraveling the reasons for the infections and finding bumps in the case numbers will be more difficult now, after the Capitol riots, when there are more than 200,000 cases reported each day.
Neither method is perfect and both have modeling and estimation. Creating numbers can be a useful way to conceptualize the damage caused by an event like the Capitol riots, but it is not the only way to know that something bad has happened. The riots were clearly a significant event and, based on all public health metrics, they probably spread COVID-19. Experts do not need to quantify exactly how much it has burdened the spread of the virus to feel confident that it is important and dangerous. “We don’t have to try to put a number on it,” says Noymer. “It is a foolish mission.”