Public health officials have largely accepted that last year's Mardi Gras helped make New Orleans an early coronavirus hotspot in the U.S., even if a lack of testing made it hard to be sure.
But a new study that sought to pinpoint how the virus spread through the city has found that 2020 Carnival revelry was responsible for tens of thousands of coronavirus cases, after a single person likely brought it to New Orleans in the weeks before Mardi Gras.
Researchers at the Scripps Research Institute, Tulane University, LSU Health and several other institutions said in a pre-publication report released Monday that the coronavirus probably arrived in New Orleans about two weeks before Fat Tuesday, likely from a person traveling from Texas.
This week everyone is kvetching over the mayor's last minute decision to close French Quarter bars during this Mardi Gras but the fact of the matter is both she and her ostensible critics at New Orleans and Co. have continuously promoted the city as a tourist destination throughout the pandemic while simultaneously blaming the behavior of locals for the spread of the disease.
Even now as the vaccines are finally arriving, we aren't going to get out of this until we agree to shut all of our risky activities down while compensating and protecting the workers affected. Instead we have watched as the political and business leadership have "blatantly ignored" the concerns of those workers over and over again in favor of their bosses' short sighted pursuit of profit.
Moving the city into and out of tighter "phases" according to whatever direction the line happens to be pointing every few weeks has only fed the cycle of anxiety, trauma, and death. But apparently that situation is acceptable enough to those with enough wealth and power to benefit that it's all we can expect from decision makers who are clearly beholden to them and not to those they exploit.
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