#Provincetown covid outbreak full#
#Provincetown covid outbreak plus#

He spent the next few days reaching friends and acquaintances from all over the country and taking notes on their COVID-19 statuses and symptoms and vaccination histories and more.

#Provincetown covid outbreak full#

'That full allotment of people that I know that I would expect over the course of this year to get a breakthrough infection were getting a breakthrough infection in a single week.' 'What was really concerning about this was it sounded like entire houses were coming down with breakthrough infections,' he says. But the numbers he was hearing about exceeded what he would have expected the breakthrough rate to be. He knew that breakthrough infections were expected, that no vaccine is 100% effective. 'That's what's always drawing me to numbers and math and forecasting and data science - it gives me some better idea of the things that I understand and the things that I can control and the things that I can't,' he says. A community willing to share COVID-19 statusesĪs the texts from his friends rolled in, Donnelly's statistician side took over - he wanted to understand what was going on. By the end of that week, news of breakthrough COVID-19 cases started to roll in. 'You're saying hi to so many people, you're in situations where you don't sleep a lot, you're running around - you're going to catch something,' he says.īut it wasn't a summer cold that was going around. Halfway through the week, when a few of Cameron Thomas' vacation housemates started coughing, he didn't think much of it. 'It would get so incredibly hot in these clubs that you would just be wet with sweat, so you'd have to step outside for a moment just to get a breath of fresh air,' says Sean Holihan, who came from Washington, D.C. It was a rainy week, which meant everyone was indoors more. Shots - Health News Think Of Your COVID-19 Vaccine Like A Very Good Raincoat, Says Dr.

As they do every year, thousands of gay men arrived for the holiday in this little artist community on the tip of Cape Cod to rent cottages, go to the beach and drag shows and restaurants, and crowd into nightclubs to dance.

#Provincetown covid outbreak plus#

'Community plus public health is magic.' ''Our entire house can't stop coughing''ĭonnelly didn't go to Provincetown with his husband for July Fourth, but his friends who were there told him all about it. 'I get goose bumps thinking about it,' he says. It's a testament to the power of citizens engaging with the scientific process, Daskalakis says. And it was that new information, in part, that prompted the agency to change its guidance for how vaccinated people should keep themselves safe at this stage of the pandemic - including a return to masking indoors. The speed of the investigation - and the exceptional participation from the mostly gay men involved in the outbreak - helped the CDC learn new information about the delta variant. Shots - Health News Do You Need To Wear A Mask Indoors Where You Live? Check This Map Without Donnelly's effort, the agency would have probably detected the outbreak at some point, Daskalakis says, but 'it wouldn't have been as rapturous an initiation of an investigation and response as we had.' A data scientist in New York City's tech sector, he started publishing his own coronavirus data reports early in the pandemic and launched a website,, with Drexel University epidemiologist Michael LeVasseur.įollowing leads from his personal network, Donnelly documented over 50 breakthrough cases coming out of Provincetown, practically in real time, and shared it with the CDC as the outbreak was still unfolding. How did they do that? It was thanks to a tip from a citizen scientist named Michael Donnelly.

'We triggered the investigation as people were getting symptomatic,' says Demetre Daskalakis, a deputy incident manager for the CDC's COVID-19 Response. Not so with the Provincetown, Mass., cluster that started around July Fourth weekend. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a lot of ways to pick up on COVID-19 outbreaks, but those methods often take awhile to bear fruit. When his vaccinated friends started getting sick following July Fourth festivities in Provincetown, Mass., he documented more than 50 breakthrough cases that ultimately led the CDC to changing its guidance on masking. A data scientist working in tech, Michael Donnelly became an amateur COVID-19 watcher early in the pandemic.