Gov. Phil Scott and Health Commissioner Mark Levine defended Vermont’s ban on multi-household gatherings Tuesday after a New York Times article voiced doubts about the policy’s efficacy.
In an article published Monday, Apoorva Mandavilli, who covers Covid-19 for the Times, spoke to public health experts who said the science behind restricting private gatherings over businesses was far from settled.
One called Vermont’s combination of restrictions “bizarre.” “Telling people they can’t spend time safely outdoors isn’t a rational approach,” Ashleigh Tuite, an infectious disease modeler at the University of Toronto, told the Times. “People are going to recognize that and push back.”
At his twice-weekly press conference on Tuesday, Scott said the story misrepresented Vermont’s restrictions. “I thought it was a bit unfair in many respects, and didn’t really dig into what we do here in Vermont,” he said.
For example, Tuite was quoted as saying it was contradictory for groups to be allowed to gather in restaurants. However, doing so would actually violate Vermont’s restrictions. While indoor dining remains open, the ban on multi-household gatherings still applies to people at restaurants.
Scott emphasized that the gathering ban was based on data from health department contact tracers. “We rely on the data and the science, and get together as a group with all the experts and make decisions based on what we’re seeing on the ground,” he said.
“Our Vermont data clearly points us to the strategic priorities and moves that we’ve made,” Levine added.
Experts cited in the article generally did not dispute that gatherings could drive transmission, a crucial point as families across the country decide whether to convene for Thanksgiving. At Tuesday’s press conference, state officials said cases in Vermont could double if people kept to their holiday plans, basing their estimates on national survey data that showed more than a third of Americans still planned to cross households for meals.
Robert Redfield, director of the CDC, also pushed back on the Times story in a Fox News interview on Tuesday. “The real driver now of this epidemic is not the public square,” Redfield said. “It’s really being driven by household gatherings.”
So far, Vermont has shared limited data to support its ban on private social gatherings.
The 71% statistic
Since Nov. 13, Levine and Scott have cited the statistic that 71% of cases connected to an outbreak were linked to a social gathering. Scott suggested an even higher number on Tuesday, saying, “I can tell you from the contact tracing we did, in all points of social gathering, almost every single one of those cases was derived from a social gathering.”
The health department has said only that the 71% statistic comes from outbreak data through case interviews. The department does not analyze more specific data about gatherings, said Ben Truman, a health department spokesperson, via email on Tuesday. In addition, details of case interviews are not public records, and their contents are not available to journalists.
When asked how the commissioner had been able to cite events like baby showers and Halloween parties as specific instances of spread, Truman said, “Our epidemiology data team provided anecdotal, informal examples of gatherings to Dr. Levine. He then related those examples at the briefings to help the public understand what we’re talking about.”
Mandavilli, The New York Times reporter, wrote Tuesday on Twitter that she had requested and not received documentation from Vermont’s health department to back up the state’s assertions about private gatherings. “Where is the data? I’ve only seen statements, but no data yet,” she wrote.
Meanwhile, the 71% statistic has been interpreted in some public comments and news reports to mean that 71% of the state’s total cases have been connected to social gatherings. A graphic posted to Scott’s social media accounts on Nov. 14 said, “71% of cases linked to private parties or social gatherings,” only specifying in the caption that it referred to cases connected to outbreaks.
According to the health department, that number applies to the period from Oct. 1 to Nov. 11. During that time, it estimates 25%-30% of cases were connected to an outbreak. The rest are considered as household or community spread, said Truman, and some may be due to travel.
So, while the 71% applies to only a fraction of the state’s total cases, it does indicate the degree to which socializing appears to have caused more infections than sources like long-term-care facilities, workplaces and schools in Vermont over that six-week period.
Contact tracing is keeping pace
Anne Sosin, a public health expert at Dartmouth College, said the 71% figure is significant. Unlike other states, she said, Vermont’s contact tracing capacity is keeping pace with the number of new cases, meaning the health department’s analysis is more likely to be accurate. According to the state, 82% of the cases in the contact tracing program are done within 24 hours.
“Other states have limited data in forming their approach, limited evidence supporting the approaches that they’re employing, and probably very limited chance of success in what they’re doing,” Sosin said.
While the Times story and others have raised questions about keeping businesses open while restricting individuals, Sosin said Vermont’s combination of restrictions shows a clear strategy. Scott’s executive order closed bars and instituted a restaurant curfew — measures that in other states would likely drive people toward private gatherings, but which are less likely to do so when paired with Vermont’s gathering ban.
“We’re seeing governors across the country throw half-measures at uncontrolled epidemics right now in order to curb transmission,” she said. “Vermont as a state is in a really, really different place, and is pursuing a very different strategy.”
The back-and-forth over Mandavilli’s story plays into a public health debate that will not be settled before Thursday’s holiday: whether a total ban on holiday gatherings, like Vermont’s, is the best way to curb spread of the virus, or whether, like abstinence education, it sets up an unenforceable rule that many are likely to break.
Even state health department guidance, while reinforcing the gathering ban, appears to offer a loophole: “If you do gather with another household, you need to quarantine for 14 days.”
In response to criticism on Twitter, the department wrote, “we know that some people might not follow this mandate & we want to ensure we are keeping the community safe. If people decide to break the rule, we are asking them to quarantine.”
Sosin said in some locations, such blunt measures based on limited data constitute bad public health policy. But Vermont’s relatively low infection rate, despite the recent surge, positions the state to suppress the virus again using harsher restrictions as a stopgap.
“I think we are in a really different place as a state,” she said. “If we can suppress infection here, then we’re going to be able to do a lot of things that other states are not able to do.”
