Was AirVenture A Superspreader? (Amended)

The texts and emails started last Tuesday, about a week after the opening of AirVenture 2022. “I got %$#(% COVID!” Well, of course you did, because everyone is eventually going to, or almost everyone. A reader wrote us yesterday wondering if AirVenture was a superspreader event. (Two of our staff were infected.)

Just guessing, I’d say it probably was. Technically, a superspreader is one individual infecting a high number of others, although “high” is subject to interpretation. Anecdotally, everyone who contacted me said they knew at least several others who got infected during the show or had the case develop when they got home a few days later. One avionics business had 12 people on site and seven were infected. My suspicion is that people who developed symptoms early at the show may have brought it with them from elsewhere during their travels. Incubation for COVID is generally given between 5 and 7 days for earlier variants but as short as two days for the BA-5 currently circulating. If you got there Sunday and got sick on Tuesday, you may have imported it or got it there.

Not that it matters enough to amount to a fart in a whirlwind. Regardless of what the CDC says, the populace has decided that COVID is now endemic, not a major risk to life and livelihood and can we please just get on with it? If there is any great lesson to draw from exposure risk at AirVenture, I think that’s probably it. If you’re worried about and it and fear that it threatens your health, go or don’t go. But at this stage, expecting any kind of broad-based mitigations to make a meaningful difference is delusional.

Looking back on the lost year of 2020, you can drive yourself nuts second-guessing whether that Draconian AirVenture cancellation was even necessary. I wasn’t going anyway, so the debate, frankly, bores me. At the time AirVenture was canceled, deaths were actually declining from a high of 2000 a day earlier in the year. By the end of 2020, they had spiked above 4000. Funeral homes were running out of supplies in some places and hospitals were nearing the breaking point.

But what makes going to events like AirVenture or Sun ‘n Fun worth the risk is that we have proven the risk of serious disease is quite low. We have vaccines and boosters, widespread home and clinical testing and much more refined therapies. Against that backdrop, the risk, while not zero, seems acceptably low to me. I wasn’t able to attend AirVenture this year, but for reasons not related to COVID concerns.

To the reader who wrote us said he wasn’t going back “until this pandemic clears up”: I’m not so sure we’re not there. If COVID truly is endemic, like the flu and the common cold, it will mutate over time and become a fixed feature of crowded venues like AirVenture. My view was always that mitigations such as masks and distancing were weak at best, but just worth doing.   

One tell is how Oshkosh itself was impacted. Evidently, not much, so if show attendees brought infections with them, they didn’t seem to have passed them on in large numbers. The Winnebago County Health Department reports 23 hospitalizations and only five since July 28. The seven-day average of cases was reported at 59, up from 52 before the show started. Hardly worthy of note, in my view. In Outagamie County to the north, cases actually fell, although hospitalizations are up.   

If that’s the shape of the future, I can live with it. And in any case, might as well get used to it. This virus is probably going to be around for a long time. And so will AirVenture.

Addition: Considering The Numbers

When I wrote this blog for Monday, I skipped my usual process of diving into the numbers. After all, why mess up a good story with, you know, actual data. But a reader called me to task for this, suggesting the risk is higher than I have suggested.

Fair enough. So using what data is available from the New York Times dashboard, I can put the risk in numerical context. A disclaimer: The data on reported cases is barely worthy of the label. A recent Bloomberg article suggested they may be undercounted by between three and 31 times. This is like pushing a chain. Nonetheless, using my own multiplier of three times, the case risk is about 100/100,000 people or 0.1 percent. Decide for yourself if that’s a high risk; for me, it is not.

Hospitalization and death rates are probably more accurate and these stand at about 13/100,000 and 0.13/100,000 respectively. Again, these aren’t high numbers. The death rate is one eighth of the fatal GA crash rate. And this is the context for attending AirVenture based on reasonably considered risk. Looked at the other way, if you consider these risks high, what are the options?

Cancel the event again? A non-starter. Require masking and distancing? With the aviation crowd, I don’t think so. Nor do I think individual masking is very effective unless those around you are doing the same. That leaves don’t go as the overarching choice. It was once reasonable to insist that big events like this be canceled or subject to mitigation efforts in service of the wider good for people who would never attend. We may get there again sometime, but we aren’t there now. For public health measures to be effective, there has to be good public buy-in, not widespread rejection. Given the record 650,000 attendance, you can easily guess public sentiment.

Here's an interesting thought experiment. Applying the numbers I presented above would yield about 650 cases of COVID out of AirVenture. Does that pass the smell test? For me, not a chance. I would guess it was many times higher than that. But it’s just a guess and, sadly, that’s all any of this is.