Andrew Sullivan Says Media Got It All Wrong About Ptown Outbreak
Provincetown resident and LGBTQ media personality Andrew Sullivan spoke to CNN's "Reliable Sources" on Sunday to say how the media got the coverage of the recent Delta virus cluster in his town wrong.
After the busy and rainy Fourth of July holiday brought thousands of tourists to the resort, cases of the Delta virus took off, including cases of the "breakthrough" virus of people who had been vaccinated but got sick.
The CDC investigated the outbreak and published a report, published on July 30, "which�documents an outbreak of COVID-19 in Barnstable County, Massachusetts —�elsewhere specified�as Provincetown — that primarily occurred in vaccinated people, following large public events in the first half of the month," notes a report on Fact check.org.
According to the report, 469 people who were in the area between July 3 through July 17 "tested positive for the coronavirus." Of them, 74% were fully vaccinated. A total of five people were hospitalized, four of them vaccinated, and there were no deaths. 90% of the subset of people who had sequencing performed on their samples were infected with the delta variant.
What was missing in the report was that "the outbreak overlapped with July Fourth weekend and 'Bear Week,' Provincetown's�annual�gathering�of gay men; 85% of the identified infections were in males. In the summer, the town's population swells to approximately�60,000 people."
While the 74% figure is correct, Fact check.org continues, it "can be misleading without the proper context, experts say, because as vaccination rates increase, it's entirely expected for a larger and larger proportion of people who are infected to be vaccinated. It doesn't mean the vaccines don't work.
"The problem is we are only looking at those who got infected, not at everyone in the area who was at risk of being infected,"�Matthew Fox, an epidemiologist at Boston University School of Public Health, Fact check.org. "Provincetown is an area with some of the highest vaccination rates in the country, so if the vaccine was not working, you'd expect the % vaccinated among the infected to be even higher than 75%, but we can't say that for sure yet because we don't know the denominators, we'd need more data. That said, all the carefully done studies to date that have included the denominators have shown the vaccine to be highly effective, even outside of the trials."
Sullivan told CNN's "Reliable Sources" on Sunday that the media missed "almost everything" in its coverage of the Ptown cluster, assuring host Brian Stelter that "it is extremely normal right now. We're something like 3% positivity."
He continued to describe the scenario of what made the outbreak unique.
"What happened is that in two weeks we had 60,000 people descend, after a year of not partying at all, on a tiny town with 900 year-round mailing addresses, and overwhelmed the place at a time when it was also cold and rainy, so everyone was crammed inside," he said. "It was like a design stress test for seeing whether it could break through.
"And the truth is, the end result of that was seven people ended up in the hospital out of 60,000 people, and no one died," he continued. "And there were some people who got a little sick, friends of mine, like my next door neighbor, but it was like a little cold — a mild few days flu, was not a big deal — but the story, I mean, this amazing story of all the gays coming to this little town, and exploding the virus, it was just too good, too good a story for journalists to resist."
And Ptown, he maintains, has been hit hard.
"And the result has been this town has been shellacked. It's been absolutely knocked sideways, so businesses and people have canceled in, in ways that are irrational, and our businesses here are suffering terribly. And I hope people will realize this is not a danger zone; it is extraordinarily safe here."
Recent data corroborates Sullivan's evaluation. "In the days and weeks after it became apparent that COVID-19 had spread throughout the community, even to fully vaccinated people, Provincetown's dance floors, bars, restaurants, and shops emptied — precisely at what would normally be the height of the summer season, when many businesses generate the vast majority of their income for the year," the website Boston Eater writes.
While the daily positivity rate has dropped down to 3.8 percent as of August 4, the media reports have hit the story hard. "But operators of restaurant and nightlife establishments say that business remains down in the wake of the cluster and press coverage of it — as much as 50 percent below pre-delta numbers for some — and they're worried that another wave could trigger the end of the summer season. Workers, meanwhile, are concerned about lost wages and the heightened potential of getting sick on the job. These conditions leave open the question of whether Provincetown's restaurants, bars, and clubs can recover their lost business in the remaining month of summer, and many owners are uncertain," adds Boston Eater.
Sullivan, who is the author of a new book of collected writings called "Out on the Limb," spoke about living with another virus — HIV, which he lives with after being diagnosed 28 years ago.
"It isn't gone. It's hiding there in the bone marrow. I've been able to repress it dramatically so it doesn't affect me. But then I go about my life and I live. You can, when you grab a new virus, lose perspective and think, 'All I have to do is to kill this virus.' So it becomes the only thing that matters in life. There are many other things mattering in life. And the goal is to get back to them. The goal is to live with these things, not to have some false triumph over them. And so, vaccination really will help people get back to normal. And in ways that we can then clear our minds, and realize we're not really at any great risk. We really aren't; that's hard to believe, I know it, but we aren't."