Maybe there was a surprise guest at the Democratic National Convention after all.
Multiple attendees at the convention in Chicago last week subsequently tested positive for the COVID-19 respiratory illness, as health officials worry about infections spiking across the country.
“When you spend five days in Chicago for the DNC and come home with COVID-19. Womp womp,” Christopher Wiggins, a reporter at The Advocate, an LGBTQ magazine, posted on X.
Several others also shared their diagnosis on social media.
“Indeed. I arrived at the DNC healthy and hopeful and left very sick and disillusioned,” human rights lawyer Yasmine Taeb wrote on X.
“Oh man! I brought home so much sweet swag from the DNC! Coffee mugs, stickers, t-shirts, poster, buttons, bags, pins, and….COVID! SWEET!” “On Democracy Pod” host Fred Wellman exclaimed.
“A friend who was at the DNC posted a positive test and said the surprise guest was, in fact, Covid,” writer Joshua Hill posted on X.
It is not immediately clear how widespread the virus was at the four-day party gathering in Chicago last week. Tens of thousands of people converged upon the Windy City for the convention.
While an exact attendance estimate wasn’t readily available, the United Center, where the main speeches took place, has a capacity of about 20,000 people, a spokesperson told The Post.
Ironically, this was the Democrats’ first major in-person party convention since 2016 due to the pandemic forcing their 2020 confab to go virtual.
Some of the convention goers were seen wearing face masks during the festivities by The Post — albeit a very small fraction of the total participants.
Still, it was a sharp contrast to the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wis., where GOP attendees’ emotions were still raw over the pandemic-era face mask mandates and other mitigation policies.
Like Republicans, Democrats did not mandate strict virus suppression measures for their convention –something that appears to have irked a small contingent of progressives.
“‘What is it like being in a room where four years ago this would have been a superspreader event?’ There is so much misinformation in this interview,” Dr. Lucky Tran griped on X in response to a video of an interview shown on CNN.
“The DNC convention is a superspreader and happening during the peak of one of the largest summer COVID surges of the pandemic,” Tran said.
David Kronig from American Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog, scolded the convention organizers for not enacting containment measures.
“It’s infuriating that the DNC required no mitigations during a massive covid [sic] surge. It’s so irresponsible on a community level but also so short-sighted,” he whined on X.
“These are the most engaged Democrats in the country, & now they’re all gonna be out of the fight for weeks, months, or forever.”
Many netizens who complained about the apparent COVID-19 spread at the convention had pictures of themselves in face masks on their social media profile pages.
While still far below pandemic levels, COVID-19 deaths have steadily risen across the country since June, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s COVID Data Tracker.
Testing also remains much lower than during the thick of the pandemic, but based on wastewater data of the virus, the national level is “very high,” per the CDC.
Amid all that, the Food and Drug Administration approved new mRNA COVID-19 vaccines last Thursday for Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna intended to combat the KP.2 variant ahead of the winter season.
