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In Provincetown, COVID-19 hits 14 friends in a show of Delta variant’s might - The Boston Globe
Aug 01, 2021 2 mins, 14 secs
Danny Barefoot and 23 friends traveled to Provincetown, Massachusetts, to dine, hit the beach and party, secure in the knowledge they were all fully vaccinated.

“I understood I wasn’t at zero risk, but I didn’t think there was the possibility of it spreading so quickly among vaccinated people,” said Barefoot, a 33-year-old Washington lawyer who developed mild symptoms during the trip.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and contributed to the agency’s recommendation that fully vaccinated people return to wearing masks indoors in areas of high transmission.

The Provincetown cluster includes more than 900 cases.

Jubilant crowds packed the longtime gay gathering place around July 4, said Bob Sanborn, executive director of the Provincetown Business Guild.

“There was no ‘Patient Zero,’” said Daniel Park, senior group leader of viral computational genomics at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is analyzing the Provincetown cluster samples.

When Howard Bragman, a Los Angeles crisis public-relations practitioner, arrived July 14, news was spreading about the outbreak, and he kept his circle small.

“The devil you know turned out to be even a little stronger than we thought,” Park said.

Unmasked interactions among vaccinated people might have been safe enough with the original alpha Covid strain, he said, “but maybe we can’t get away with them now.”.

All recovered quickly, but such cases, in which vaccinated people apparently not only caught the virus but passed it on, are the focus of concern.

“The crux of the problem of how we’re going to get back to normality right now centers around the question: Do vaccinated people transmit the virus, and to what degree?” said Harvard University’s Deborah Hung, director of the infectious disease and microbiome program at the Broad Institute.

The crux of the crux is whether even vaccinated people with no symptoms can transmit the virus, she added.

Tom Doyle, a Wakefield, Massachusetts, retiree who visited Provincetown for three days ending July 23, thought he was appropriately wary.

Fully vaccinated, he wore a mask in stores, and dined out just three times, only once indoors.

The CDC report on Provincetown suggests that viral loads tended to be just as high among vaccinated people as unvaccinated.

Provincetown data doesn’t offer “hard, smoking-gun evidence that a vaccine breakthrough has actually transmitted,” Park said.

They visited a separate group of fully vaccinated friends in Boston on the way home and none became sick

Bragman agreed, and said the gay community, scarred by the plague of AIDS, understands intuitively how public health is about caring for friends, neighbors and ultimately all Americans

“As a gay man who’s lived through too many epidemics now, I’ve learned it’s about personal responsibility,” Bragman said

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