That’s the headline from a 9-5-20 Business Insider report by Aria Bendix. An initial report on 8-23-20 linked the event to 53 infections and one death; the 3 deaths reported in the latest account were all among people who did NOT attend the wedding and reception, but came in contact with people who had attended the event.
The wedding and reception took place on August 7; they were largely indoors. At least 65 people attended, violating the state limit of 50. There’s no info on whether attendees were wearing masks.
The pastor who presided gave a sermon on August 30 defending the event in Millinocket. Via Zoe Greenberg at the Boston Globe:
The officiant of a now-infamous wedding in Millinocket gave a defiant sermon during an indoor church service on Sunday, just a day after Maine’s CDC announced it was investigating a coronavirus outbreak among those affiliated with the Sanford church.
Todd Bell, the pastor, portrayed Calvary Baptist Church, which he leads, as being on the front lines of a culture war, battling against a “socialistic platform” that mandates mask-wearing and distance learning in schools.
“I’ll tell you what the world wants all the churches to do,” Bell said during one of two Sunday services, which the church posted on YouTube. “They want us to shut down, go home, and let people get used to that just long enough until we can finally stop the advancing of the Gospel.”
The Boston Globe account of Bell’s views includes this tidbit:
The pastor also warned his congregants that a vaccine against the coronavirus would include “aborted baby tissue,” an issue that some religious and antiabortion groups have seized upon in recent months. A number of vaccines, including those against rubella, chickenpox, and shingles, were manufactured using fetal cells from elective abortions decades ago, but the cell lines that continue to grow the vaccines are now generations removed from fetal cells. In April, a group including committee chairmen from the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, urged the Food and Drug Administration not to develop a coronavirus vaccine using cell lines that originated from fetal cells.
Bell said that instead of trusting a vaccine, he would put his faith in God, “the one that has the power to remove pestilences.”
Greetings from Idiot America, where a fact is what anyone wants to believe, and truth is measured by how strongly they believe it.
...The rise of Idiot America is essentially a war on expertise. It’s not so much antimodernism or the distrust of intellectual elites that Richard Hofstadter deftly teased out of the national DNA forty years ago. Both of those things are part of it. However, the rise of Idiot America today represents—for profit mainly, but also, and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power—the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who best know what they’re talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a preacher, or a scientist, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.
Speaking of which, the Business Insider report has some input from actual experts:
The Millinocket wedding is a classic example of a superspreading event, in which one person infects a disproportionately large number of people. Researchers in Hong Kong have suggested that superspreader events involving indoor social gatherings may be responsible for the majority of coronavirus transmission.
Weddings are particularly high-risk, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, because attendees often travel from outside the local area, which brings a risk of either introducing the coronavirus to local guests or spreading the virus to other parts of the state or country.
A study from Japanese scientists estimated that the odds of a person spreading the coronavirus in a closed environment is almost 19 times higher than in an open-air environment, though that research is still awaiting peer review.
Of course you don’t have to be a professional bible-banger to spread dangerous nonsense. Via CNN, Donald Trump is openly encouraging members of his personal cult to ignore mask wearing guidelines, by mocking Joe Biden and Democrats.
Speaking to a largely mask-less crowd in Pennsylvania, Trump asked his supporters if they know "a man that likes a mask as much" as Biden.
"It gives him a feeling of security," the President said. "If I was a psychiatrist, I'd say this guy has some big issues."
Trump's comments, which came the day after the US topped 185,000 deaths from Covid-19, run counter to the advice of public health experts, who have emphasized the importance of face coverings amid the country's reopening, given that people without symptoms could unknowingly transmit the virus. Masks are primarily to prevent people who have the virus from infecting others.
...Trump, however, has sought to politicize the wearing of masks. In May, he shared a tweet mocking Biden for wearing one at a Memorial Day ceremony.
"This macho stuff, for a guy -- I shouldn't get going, but it just, it costs people's lives. It's costing people's lives," Biden said.
He added: "Presidents are supposed to lead, not engage in folly and be falsely masculine."
There’s no way to sugarcoat it. Trump, the Trump Party, and the Christian Right who follow Trump have become an actual death cult. The problem for those of us still living in the reality-based community is that they are a health risk to us as well, as the Maine super spreader event demonstrates.
Stupidity is a capital crime. If and when we ever get an effective vaccine, and if they continue to refuse it, they can keep relying on their God to save them, while we can trust Darwin to aid in sorting things out. Cold comfort, but that’s what it is coming down to.
Voting like your life depends on it is no longer a joke — it’s the reality.