Birthday parties might have fueled COVID surges: study
Birthday parties might have fueled COVID-19 surges during the darkest days, a new study suggests.
Kiddie birthday parties, to be precise.
Researchers matched coronavirus statistics with data on birthday parties and found 15.8 more positive coronavirus tests per 10,000 people than in households where no birthday party was held, said researchers. Adult birthdays were correlated with 5.8 more positive tests in the ensuing two weeks.
“There’s a natural inclination to not think that your family members or friends are potentially infected or that you could potentially spread to family members or your friends,” Dr. Chris Whaley, an author of the study and policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, told USA Today.
While the researchers didn’t count birthday parties per se, they used the birth dates of household members as a proxy for social gatherings and in-person festivities, they said in a statement. Familiarity could cause people to let down their guard, feeling as though their beloveds were “safe.”
However, that was rarely the case. And birthday parties are the exact type of social gathering that might have contributed during the pandemic’s height, the study found.
In counties with high rates of coronavirus infections, households with recent birthdays were 30% more likely than households with no birthday to test positive, based on data from health insurance claims.
“These gatherings are an important part of the social fabric that holds together families and society as a whole. However, as we show, in high-risk areas, they can also expose households to COVID-19 infections,” said study senior author Anupam Jena, the Ruth L. Newhouse Associate Professor of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School.
In more formal settings, people tend to take precautions such as wearing masks and social distancing, enforced by the venue.
“While people are doing a good job or a better job of social distancing or wearing their masks when they go to a supermarket, when they get home they’re more likely to relax and not necessarily wear masks or social-distance,” Dr. Timothy Brewer, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of California, Los Angeles who was not involved with the study, told USA Today.
Health experts had long speculated that small, informal gatherings might have been one driving factor in the spread of coronavirus, but it was hard to measure risks linked to various kinds of gatherings, the researchers said, without massive contact tracing and diagnostic testing.
The team took a different approach, inferring a relationship between social gatherings and COVID-19 by studying whether infection rates increase in households in the weeks after a member had a birthday. This was based on the notion that such occasions often entail a get-together, and that birth dates are easy to obtain from medical and insurance records.
They analyzed 3 million U.S. households to find that over the first 45 weeks of 2020, households that had recent birthdays in counties with high COVID-19 transmission averaged 8.6 more cases per 10,000 people than households in the same counties without a birthday, the researchers said.
It wasn’t just birthdays that were the culprit.
“We were only able to examine a single kind of event that likely leads to social gatherings, but given the magnitude of the increased risk associated with having a birthday in the household, it’s clear that informal gatherings of all kinds played a significant role in the spread of COVID-19,” Whaley said.
