Thousands of Orthodox Jews participated in a COVID-19 study last year The first results are in jewishledger.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from jewishledger.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
186 shares
Hundreds of mourners gather in the Brooklyn borough of New York, Tuesday, April 28, 2020, to observe a funeral for Rabbi Chaim Mertz, a Hasidic Orthodox leader whose death was reportedly tied to the coronavirus.(Peter Gerber via AP)
JTA One year after COVID-19 first walloped Jewish communities in the United States, a scientific study has confirmed something that many in the communities have long believed: gatherings during the week of Purim served as superspreader events.
A paper published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association Network Open, a peer-review journal that is open to the public, concludes that the coronavirus was spreading widely in Orthodox communities across the country last spring around that Jewish holiday before public health warnings were given about the dangers of large assemblies.
Thousands of Orthodox Jews participated in a COVID-19 study last year. The first results are in. March 10, 2021 5:48 pm People congregate outside of Congregation Yetev Lev D Satmar in Brooklyn, where state officials halted a planned 10,000-person wedding in October 2020. (Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Advertisement
(JTA) One year after COVID-19 first walloped Jewish communities in the United States, a scientific study has confirmed something that many in the communities have long believed: gatherings during the week of Purim served as superspreader events.
A paper published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association Network Open, a peer-review journal that is open to the public, concludes that the coronavirus was spreading widely in Orthodox communities across the country last spring around that Jewish holiday before public health warnings were given about the dangers of large assemblies.
Thousands of Orthodox Jews participated in a COVID-19 study last year The first results are in now stljewishlight.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from stljewishlight.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Because Purim in 2020 caused hundreds of Orthodox Jews to become ill or hospitalized with COVID-19 in the earliest stages of the pandemic, we realized that these patients who were convalescing when others were just coming in contact with SARS-CoV-2 for the first time were an important population to study to better understand why and how the virus spreads through a culturally bonded community, says study co-senior author Avi Rosenberg, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor of pathology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. We felt with that insight, health care practitioners could develop strategies based on scientific evidence to limit the spread of COVID-19 while still enabling important religious and other cultural practices to go on, he explains.