Where Are All the Movie-Theater COVID-19 Cases?
Neal Pollack asks an interesting question:
I’ve been looking, very hard, for any reported evidence, because I don’t want even vaguely encourage people to make a deadly choice. But there hasn’t been one reported COVID-related death to movie theater attendance anywhere in the world. There hasn’t even been a reported case of COVID. Not a symptomatic case. Not an asymptomatic case. Nothing.
How can that be possible? Movie theaters aren’t open in Los Angeles or New York right now, but they are open most other places. Seventy percent of all screens in the United States are operating, not at full capacity, but available for customers. The coronavirus hasn’t gone away. So where are the cases? Not one case in six months. Nine months, really, when you consider that the plague started in China in December. Again, how can that be possible?
There are no movie theater superspreading events in the database.
Yet:
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) includes going to a movie theater on its list of higher-risk activities. This is because a movie theater brings people indoors and in close proximity for extended periods of time, Anne Rimoin, PhD, MPH, professor of epidemiology at UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, tells Health.
“The virus is transmitted through droplets when we talk, laugh, and breathe. A movie theater is a place where you sit with a room full of strangers eating and drinking for two to three hours with sub-optimal ventilation,” explains Rimoin. “It’s exactly the type of scenario we need to be avoiding to reduce opportunity for the virus to spread.”
The possibility of transmission within a movie theater is similar to that inside restaurants, adds Carol A. Winner, MPH, founder of the Give Space personal distancing movement in 2017. “Although people are talking less in the theater, the mask may come off, and then the danger comes when they laugh, cough, sneeze, and then may try to talk to their friend who is five feet away,”
“The virus is transmitted through droplets when we talk, laugh, and breathe. A movie theater is a place where you sit with a room full of strangers eating and drinking for two to three hours with sub-optimal ventilation,” explains Rimoin. “It’s exactly the type of scenario we need to be avoiding to reduce opportunity for the virus to spread.”
The possibility of transmission within a movie theater is similar to that inside restaurants, adds Carol A. Winner, MPH, founder of the Give Space personal distancing movement in 2017. “Although people are talking less in the theater, the mask may come off, and then the danger comes when they laugh, cough, sneeze, and then may try to talk to their friend who is five feet away,”
Speculating, if aerosols rather than large droplets drive transmission, the fact that there appear to not have been any superspreading events in movie theaters may become easier to understand: Singing, shouting and laughing greatly increase aerosol exhalation but movies are typically watched in silence. Moreover, if movie theaters have well functioning ventilation systems the risk of aeorol transmission is reduced even further. And it looks like movie theaters have gotten that message:
Aerosolized microdoplets could lead to the spread of the novel coronavirus, which has led people to worry about traveling to indoor spaces, NPR reports.
So movie theaters have had to adapt.
So movie theaters have had to adapt.
[AMC Entertainment CEO Adam Aron] said: “But much more important than that, we’ve invested literally millions and millions in high-tech solutions. We’ve upgraded our air filters to MERV 13. It’s about four times the filtration that we had prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. We’ve bought electrostatic sprayers for all of our theaters so that we’re spraying down out auditoriums with these electronically charged cleaning solutions, so we’re all over both tough and airborne transmission of the virus.”
Blake Andersen, Megaplex Theatres president, told me back in August that the Utah theater chain increased its ventilation and filtering procedures.
Blake Andersen, Megaplex Theatres president, told me back in August that the Utah theater chain increased its ventilation and filtering procedures.
Andersen told me that the system was “incredible” before. But Megaplex worked to “increase ventilation and increase filtration, so that you know it’s even better than it was before.”
