41K test positive following holiday
Many people ignored warning not to gather
More than 41,000 Tennesseans tested positive for the coronavirus in the seven days immediately following Thanksgiving, launching a widely feared post-holiday surge that public officials say may lead to one of the darkest winters in modern American history.
That week – from Nov. 27 to Dec. 3 – unearthed more positive COVID-19 tests than any other seven-day span since the pandemic came to Tennessee. And the infection total grows daily as many samples collected during this week are still being tested.
Inevitably, at least some of these post-thanksgiving infections will end in death. Most of those deaths won’t occur for another week or two and will not be publicly reported until a week or two after that.
Therefore, as exhausted Americans find comfort in promising news of a forthcoming vaccine, Christmas will arrive before Tennessee has a clear picture of the death toll from Thanksgiving, potentially leading families to underestimate the threat of the holiday and repeat the risk of gathering with relatives and friends.
This exposure risk should’ve become clear to all long ago, but tragically it has not sunk in for some, said Dr. Williams Schaffner, an infections disease expert at Vanderbilt University. Every major holiday this year triggered an infection spike, and there is no reason to believe Christmas will be differ
ent, Schaffner said.
“We paid a price after Memorial Day. We paid a price after July 4. The same thing will happen, more or less, after Thanksgiving,” Schaffner said. “I don’t know how many lessons we need – how many times do we have to do this experiment to convince ourselves of the result?”
This story, which is based on statewide virus data released by the Tennessee Department of Health as of Thursday afternoon, measures the number of Tennesseans who tested positive in the week after Thanksgiving, not people who were tested prior to Thanksgiving and had their results reported the week after. The count of 41,536 infections only includes Tennesseans who submitted a test sample in the week after Thanksgiving and therefore could’ve been infected at a holiday gathering.
Health officials widely discouraged Thanksgiving gatherings in an effort to control the virus but largely conceded that Americans would most likely gather anyway. And they did.
More than one million Americans packed into flights each day from the Wednesday before Thanksgiving to the following Sunday, the highest level of travel since the pandemic began in March, according to the Transportation Security Administration.
While the total number of travelers was much lower than normal years, it stood in stark contrast to the aims of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which recommended that Americans do not travel at all for the holiday.
The impact was swift. On Monday, Nov. 30, as many testing centers reopened after the holiday weekend, more than 11,500 Tennesseans submitted nasal samples that positive. This is the most infections ever detected in a single day in the state.
It is impossible to calculate how many of these Tennesseans were truly infected with the coronavirus during a Thanksgiving gathering. Some people may have been infected prior to Thanksgiving but only were tested in the week after the holiday. Others likely caught the virus through essential jobs or everyday exposure completely unrelated to the holiday. The virus is now so prevalent in Tennessee that identifying a definitive source of a new infection is often hopeless.
Dr. Rand Carpenter, chief epidemiologist for the Nashville Metro Public Health, said Thursday the city was most likely still at the very beginning of its a post-thanksgiving infection surge.
“The surge, or a possible surge in cases after the Thanksgiving holidays, would be something we are just now encountering,” Carpenter said.
“The numbers you heard this morning are evidence that we are still ramping up in cases even now. Whether that is due to Thanksgiving, or just this continued spread in the community, is hard to pinpoint at this time.”
Brett Kelman is the health care reporter for The Tennessean. He can be reached at 615-259-8287 or at brett.kelman@tennessean.com. Follow him on Twitter at @brettkelman.