Oktoberfest: superspreading event and millions of corona infections?
Kekulé clearly contradicts colleagues
Created: 09/23/2022, 10:05 am
By: Momir Takac
The virologist Alexander Kekulé © Eventpress Stauffenberg/Imago
Before the Oktoberfest, experts were certain: the Oktoberfest will lead to an explosion in the number of corona infections.
The virologist Alexander Kekulé sees it differently.
Munich – The Oktoberfest on the Theresienwiese is in full swing.
After a two-year break, people from all over the world are once again drawn to Munich to celebrate at the world's most famous folk festival.
And they do.
The mood in the Oktoberfest beer tents is great, even if the results from the first weekend were rather mixed.
It was to be expected that the beer tents would be full.
It is also assumed that infections with the corona virus will skyrocket during and after the Wiesn in and around Munich.
According to Kekulé, Oktoberfest will not cause a health emergency
No statement can be made about this yet, but virologists warned urgently in the run-up to the Oktoberfest.
Oliver Keppler, virologist at the LMU Munich, spoke of “synchronized superspreading with worldwide visibility.” Other experts, such as the pandemic officer at the University Hospital Rechts der Isar of the TU Munich, Christoph Spinner, are relaxed about the Oktoberfest.
So does the not undisputed virologist Alexander Kekulé.
He writes in his column at
Focus online
: "The Wiesn will neither cause an explosion in the number of cases nor a health emergency." Kekulé justifies his statement with the fact that more than 90 percent of the population has now been vaccinated against the corona virus or has survived a previous infection.
Regional waves of infection could be observed at the beginning of the corona pandemic, when the majority of people were still “immunologically naïve”.
Kekulé: "Wiesn will not be a 'superspreading event'"
Kekulé also expects a large number of people to be infected as a result of the Oktoberfest, but not with “continued spread to the rest of the population”.
The virologist refers to numbers after smaller folk festivals in recent months, such as the Freisinger Wiesn, where there was only a temporary sharp increase in the number of cases in the region.
In his Focus online
column, Kekulé also contradicts
his colleague Keppler, who puts the probability of coming into contact with the corona virus during a stay in a beer tent for several hours on a scale of 1 to 10, at “9 to 10”.
Kekulé uses a sample from the Robert Koch Institute that was already taken during the Oktoberfest.
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According to this, only two out of 100 randomly selected Wiesn visitors were PCR positive for Corona.
However, since not every PCR positive is infectious and not every infectious person would certainly infect another visitor, Kekulé sees little danger.
The virologist concludes that the probability of contact with Sars-CoV-2 is more like 1 in 1000.
The risk of infection outdoors is no higher than anywhere else in Munich.
Kekulé fears bottlenecks in Munich emergency rooms
The Oktoberfest will not be a "superspreading event" either, Kekulé predicts.
Superspreaders existed at the beginning of the corona pandemic, when people infected many more people than was typical for the corona virus.
That was because at that time most people in the world were neither vaccinated nor recovered.
This is not to be expected at the Oktoberfest.
It is "hard to imagine that a virus shepherd has contact with a sufficient number of immunologically unprotected people for superspreading," writes Kekulé.
There will also be no “millions of infections”.
Likewise, the introduction of a "super mutant" from abroad is "very unlikely".
There is no evidence of this on any continent.
The virologist is only concerned about possible bottlenecks in the emergency rooms of the hospitals in Munich.
There is a risk of overloading due to increased accidents, beer corpses, more people infected with corona and staff shortages caused by the "Wiesn flu".
(mt)