The Sundance festival in Utah, which attracted 120,000 people this year, could have been an early hub for COVID-19 in the United States, as numerous attendees reported experiencing coronavirus symptoms after the event, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The festival started on Jan. 23, the same day the lockdown started in Wuhan, China.
"Logic dictates that they most probably did have it," Dean Hart, a microbiologist and expert in virus transmission, told THR of the presentation of symptoms. "With Sundance, you've got the perfect formula for this virus to really go to town and contaminate everybody," the Columbia assistant professor said.
More than 3.8 million people have been infected with the coronavirus, and nearly 270,000 people have died. In the U.S., nearly 75,000 people have died.
Olivia Charmaine Morris, a Sundance attendee, told THR she was severely sick. The senior director of development and production at Kerry Washington's Simpson Street said people she knew got sick, too.
"I had a few different friends I talked to since who were like, 'I got sick, my lawyer, my assistant, my stylist,' " she says. "Like whole groups of people getting sick, not just like random people here and there. Anecdotally, I know seven or eight people that had the same symptoms, and they all know three to seven more people."
A spokesperson for the Sundance festival said: “We’re sorry to hear that any of our festival attendees were unwell either during or after our January edition. We are not aware of any confirmed festival-connected cases of COVID-19.”