Were those Biden victory celebrations coronavirus superspreader events? Health experts ‘extremely concerned’ they could be

After Joe Biden was projected the winner of the 2020 presidential election by the Associated Press on Saturday, videos and images of people dancing and cheering in the streets of New York, D.C. and cities around the country began flooding social media.

Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency physician and public health professor at George Washington University who previously served as Baltimore’s health commissioner, told MarketWatch that she was “extremely concerned” while watching these celebrations being broadcast on the news and across Facebook FB, -2.27%, TikTok and Twitter TWTR, -1.80% over the weekend.

Why? Because this weekend saw more than 120,000 new cases of COVID-19 a day in the U.S. And the CDC has warned throughout the pandemic that large gatherings of people, where it is hard to keep six feet apart, can spread the coronavirus. “The more people an individual interacts with at a gathering and the longer that interaction lasts, the higher the potential risk of becoming infected with COVID-19 and COVID-19 spreading,” the CDC writes in its guidelines for events and gatherings.