While the Department of Health warned that it was unclear whether those other people had contracted the virus at the rally or elsewhere, spokesman Scott Smith told ABC News that “according to the characteristics of the case” in Beltrami County, where Bemidji, Trump’s rally on September 18, meets, with a wedding that took place on September 19. Array appears to be “the likely drivers of COVID-19 case accumulation” in the county.
“We say with certainty for cases that they did not report attending a political rally and/or attended a wedding where they were exposed to SARS-CoV-2,” Smith said. “However, those occasions seem, based on the characteristics of the case, to probably point to the expansion of COVID-19 cases in Beltrami County. “
According to Smith, since September 1, there have been 278 cases among Beltrami County residents, and 43% of cases occurred two to 10 days after the September 18 rally and a wedding on September 19. In a case interview, Smith said, 15 cases related to marriage and nine cases related to collecting and two other cases related to a same-day anti-political demonstration. Eight other cases attended outdoor weddings in the county.
Trump’s rally took an outdoor position at Bemidji Regional Airport, with plenty of accumulated supporters and very few dressed in masks.
Earlier this week, the Federal Emergency Management Agency indexed Bemidji as one of the fastest launchers in terms of the spread of the coronavirus.
This is the moment when one of the president’s rallies is connected to an outbreak of instances in a region, after the president’s first post-COVID rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in June of this year, related to an accumulation of coronavirus cases that followed in the domain in a time thereafter.
Smith told ABC News that the intensive care patient was admitted to hospital on October 4 and transferred to intensive care on October 7; the other patient was hospitalized between September 28 and October 4 without admission to intensive care. has been informed, he added.
As with other cases similar to Trump’s rallies, another Minnesota Department of Health spokesman Doug Schultz told ABC News that he may simply not say that patients had contracted the virus at the rally or reaction event, but that they had stated that they did attend the occasions “the time when they were likely to be exposed. “
Schultz said the one-touch state seeks to identify any additional cases and the secondary spread of the virus from those patients.
Previously, the Minnesota Department of Health had told ABC News that “some” COVID-19 cases were similar to the president’s rally in Minneapolis in August, but said it was not a large enough number to be considered a mass spread.
In reaction to trump’s revelation of a rally, former Vice President Joe Biden’s crusade accused Trump of “deliberately exposing his own pandemic supporters to his own political satisfaction. “
“Donald Trump has utterly failed in this duty, lying about this fatal risk to other Americans from the start while mishandling the backlash, and willingly exposing his own supporters to the pandemic for his own optical satisfaction” – Speaking of Biden campaign Andrew Bates said in a statement. “They and all of us deserve a replacement and a genuine plan to triumph over this crisis and middling families. “
On Friday, the Minnesota Peasant Democratic Labor Party criticized Trump’s campaign.
“Since the beginning of this pandemic, Republicans in Donald Trump and Minnesota have ignored public fitness experts and advanced their re-election on Minnesota fitness,” DFL President Ken Martin wrote in a statement. “It’s only a matter of time before the harmful occasions of unmasked crusades organized through Donald Trump and Minnesota Republicans took The Minnesotans to the hospital. “
John Verhovek of ABC News contributed to this report.
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