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A UVM basketball game that VTDigger previously linked to a handful of Covid-19 cases appears to have been a major spreading event.
Twenty people who attended the March 10 UVM basketball game reported that they later tested positive for Covid-19, according to a VTDigger survey. An additional 34 people who responded said they experienced flu-like symptoms, but couldn’t get a test.
Three of the attendees with a positive test— Dave Reissig, Bernie Juskiewicz, and Mike Rappold — later died of the virus.
The data suggests that the virus was spreading in Vermont much earlier than was previously thought. “Certainly at the time of the basketball game exposure we were not aware of community transmission because all we knew is we had one case in the whole state,” Health Commissioner Mark Levine said in an interview this week.
The interview marked the first time a health department official acknowledged that the game may have been a spreading event.
That night marked the final game before the American East Conference and the NCAA canceled the collegiate playoffs due to Covid-19. There were no thoughts of canceling the March 10 game, spokesperson Enrique Corredera told VTDigger earlier this month. At the time there had been just one “presumed positive” case in Southern Vermont. But the 3,200 cheering fans filling Patrick Gym represented all the ways not to act in a pandemic: squeezed shoulder-to-shoulder on the bleachers, offering high fives, yelling, sharing pizza with neighbors.
VTDigger’s initial reporting on the possible spread of Covid-19 sparked a flood of emails from ticketholders and their family members, each recounting their own symptoms and speculations about the March 10 game. Many who fell sick had also attended the March 7 game; two referees who worked at that game later tested positive for Covid-19.
VTDigger received more than 300 survey responses, and confirmed the information for each of the reported cases.
There is no way to prove that those who came down with Covid-19 contracted it at the game. The UVM staff took extra precautions, wiping down the locker room doors and bathrooms, discouraging high fives, and putting out stations with hand sanitizer.
Those who experienced flu-like symptoms after the game spanned in age from their early 20s to mid-80s, according to responses to VTDigger’s survey. The virus appeared to have spread widely across sections 4 and 6 of the gym, though fans in seven out of 10 sections reported symptoms. Those who reported illness hailed from towns across Chittenden County and Vermont.
Linda Carey, her brothers Jim and Steve Chase, and Steve’s wife Karen, went to the game together, and sat in sections 4 and 6, Jim Chase said. “The only place that Jim, Steve, Karen, and Linda were together in one place was at the UVM games,” wrote Katherine Chase, Jim’s wife, who didn’t attend the game.
Jim, who lives in South Burlington, came down with a fever, joint pain, headaches and chills on March 18 and tested positive on March 23, Katherine said; his brother Steve followed with a positive test the next day. Karen felt sick as well.
The Chases’ sister, Linda Carey, collapsed on March 18, days after she lost her appetite and became tired and feverish. She went to the hospital, tested positive for Covid-19 soon after, and spent three weeks on a ventilator in the intensive care unit. She celebrated her 70th birthday in a hospital bed. Carey is still doing physical therapy and walks with a cane as a result of the side effects of the illness, she said.
“We almost lost her! She received a miracle and is now home after 57 days of hospitalization,” Katherine Chase wrote in an email.
The proximity of the cases in certain rows suggests that the virus may have been spreading.
Five people in section 6, row U came down with symptoms, including Bruce Perreault, who attended the game with a friend from Leicester. “At the time seemed like any other game,” he said in an email. But the next week, he slept for most of three days. When Perreault called his doctor, he was told to “wait it out.”
His friend also came down with the virus and was hospitalized for two weeks. Further down the row, Charles Keating and his wife Samantha both came down with mild symptoms, but tested positive for antibodies.
The totals may have been even higher. Four more people who took VTDigger’s survey reported testing positive, and 47 additional people said they had experienced Covid-related symptoms, but didn’t receive a test. VTDigger was unable to reach those individuals to confirm their responses.
Health department officials said they weren’t aware that Covid-19 cases may be linked to the basketball game. Even if they had known, Levine said, they didn’t have the tools and testing materials to be able to contain it.
The state, and the country as a whole, had a shortage of tests, he said, and also didn’t have enough contact tracers. “The country at that point in time, and I’ve said this many times, didn’t have the opportunity to practice containment,” he said, referring to the strategy the health department has since adopted.
Scientists didn’t know how the virus spread, and the variety of symptoms it could cause. “It’s a great illustration of how we knew, literally, so little … about this virus when it first appeared, and what we know now,” Levine said.
One attendee, Mark Young, said he’s reserving judgment on whether he picked up the virus at the UVM game. He and his girlfriend Sandy Benoit sat in section 6 and the following week, Benoit got so sick she spent 10 hours in the emergency room. Young tested positive for the virus on March 23.
Young has since donated his plasma, which has Covid-19 antibodies, twice to help others recover from the virus.
It doesn’t much matter where he got the virus. “Did we contract it [at the game]? I don’t know,” he said.
But he hasn’t forgotten the fear he felt when Benoit was violently ill. “Those five days were the scariest of my life,” Young said.
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