#PROVINCETOWN COVID SPIKE SERIES#

For us, the sales trend was 30 percent higher than our best May and June ever in the 10 years since we opened our doors.”īut with the Delta variant causing a spike in COVID cases across much of the country and a high-profile cluster in Provincetown specifically, many of the businesses in Provincetown have seen their hopes of a banner year dashed. May and June were the best many businesses had seen in years. One restaurant owner said they were having their best year on record, and Francesca Cerutti owner of Cape Art Tiles and The Cid Bolduc Gallery in Provincetown, said “Out of the gate, the season took off surprisingly, incredibly strong. And the fall? That’s even less certain.All signs pointed to a record year for small businesses on Cape Cod and business owners in Provincetown were looking forward to making up for 2020 when the COVID-19 public health emergency and subsequent government restrictions significantly impacted their high-season and their bottom lines.Īt the start of the 2021 season, it looked as though their hopes were realized. “Hot vax summer” has become the summer of not knowing. We’ve now learned that “life as normal” at this point in the pandemic was never realistic: There are still too many questions outstanding, too much residual uncertainty over long-term effects, or whether we can contract delta twice. But it’s also a dispiriting wake-up call: In an era of constantly updated variants (“delta plus” has already been identified, like some new dystopian iPhone release), it appears that private citizens will have to rely, at least in part, on their own ability to research and reason their way to best practices. “The people involved in the Provincetown outbreak were meticulous in making lists of their contacts and exposures.” “This is one of the most impressive examples of citizen science I have seen,” she said. Celine Gounder, an infectious disease specialist at New York’s Bellevue Hospital Center, said as much to the New York Times. Those of us who reached out, I like to think, pushed our collective understanding of delta a step forward with our reporting. “I can’t believe we were joking about the ‘Fagbash variant’ a few weeks ago and now we are literally the case study for the variant,” a friend texted me in response to the CDC’s sudden interest, referencing a popular P-Town party. Around that same time, the CDC began asking for Provincetown positives to come forward with their stories. Many of us began sounding the alarm just after the July Fourth holiday, and by midmonth the Massachusetts Department of Public Health had started collaborating with the CDC to track the new cluster. I Am One of the Students Who Got a False Positive at Rice Universityįorty years almost to the day after the New York Times first reported on the “ rare cancer seen in 41 homosexuals,” here we were again, confused and angry participants in a public health emergency.

My Experience Was Very Different.Ī Mom Who Hasn’t Gotten Vaxxed-and Might Not Vaccinate Her Kids-Explains Herself My COVID ICU in Miami Is Being Slammed Yet Again. As of July 31, the P-Town outbreak had ballooned to 965 cases. According to a report the agency released on Friday, the CDC’s latest findings were based on a July 4 COVID-19 outbreak in queer mecca Provincetown, Massachusetts, where among a cluster of 469 ( with no deaths) at the time of study, an astonishing three-quarters of the infected had been fully vaccinated. While vaccines appear to remain strong against the virus, new evidence suggests that fully vaccinated people with so-called breakthrough infections may be every bit as infectious as those yet to receive their shots, even if their own cases remain relatively mild. Last Thursday, an internal slide presentation leaked from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed that the delta variant of the coronavirus is even more contagious than previously thought-more communicable than Ebola and the common cold, as spreadable as the chickenpox.

#PROVINCETOWN COVID SPIKE SERIES#

Coronavirus Diaries is a series of dispatches exploring how the coronavirus is affecting people’s lives.

Provincetown covid spike