Patient who believed pandemic was a hoax dies after attending COVID party
A coronavirus patient in his 30s has died from COVID-19 after attending a ‘COVID party’, a San Antonio health official said.
“This is a party held by somebody diagnosed (with) the COVID virus and the thought is to see if the virus is real and to see if anyone gets infected,” Dr Jane Appleby, the Chief Medical Officer for Methodist Hospital and Methodist Children’s Hospital said.
“Just before the patient died, they looked at their nurse and said ‘I think I made a mistake, I thought this was a hoax, but it’s not’,” Dr Appleby said.
COVID parties are a trend in the US among college students and younger adults, where attendees try to get infected with coronavirus by mixing with an already infected person at a party. Some of these parties include a cash prize for the first person to return a positive result.
Dr Appleby said the trend across the US is most popular with people who do not know whether to believe coronavirus is real.
She said the patient, who lived in Bexar County in the Texan city of San Antonio, had become critically ill before his death. She said the unnamed man told his nurses about the party, which had been hosted by someone diagnosed with COVID-19, according to
The Independent.
Dr Appleby told the patient’s story as the number of coronavirus cases in the county spikes.
“It doesn’t discriminate and none of us are invincible,” she said.
“I don’t want to be an alarmist, and we’re just trying to share some real-world examples to help our community realise that this virus is very serious and can spread easily.”
In her county the rate of people returning a positive result for COVID-19 has jumped to 22 per cent.
She said it was a “concerning increase” from several weeks ago, when the rate was at about five per cent.
In the city there are more than 19,100 cases of coronavirus.
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