| "If you even remember the Provincetown outbreak a year ago—which, in Pandemic Time, probably feels like a century—this may be what you know about it," Maryn McKenna writes in her most recent WIRED feature. "The shots had been available for seven months. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had said that vaccinated Americans could take their masks off. There was a delicious anticipatory buzz of life returning to normal, and then the ice-bucket shock of discovering hot vax summer was over before it started." That was the national narrative, anyway: disappointment, fear, recrimination. On the ground, though, in one of the capitals of queer summer life in America, the story of the Delta wave played out very differently. Gideon Lichfield, WIRED's editor in chief, wrote last week that "the Provincetown wave could have led to hundreds of thousands of additional cases. Instead it fizzled." By the fall, it was responsible for no more than 0.1 percent of cases nationwide. The question that drives McKenna's reporting is simple: Why? What was special about Provincetown? To answer it, she traces the path of the outbreak from the nightclubs on Commercial Street ("so crowded that you had to slide skin to skin to get outside for some air") to a data sleuth's laptop in New York to a genomics lab near Boston, revealing a network of people who had many reasons not to do what they did, but did it anyway. As one public health expert told McKenna, Provincetown "should have been a message: We can avoid large outbreaks, if we want to." Anthony Lydgate | Features Editor |
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