On Tuesday, March 31st, 2020, the Austin Public Health Department reported that a group of 70 people in their 20s chartered a plane to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Their mission – to indulge in spring break festivities during the coronavirus pandemic.
About 70 students from the University of Texas chartered a plane to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, in late March. On Tuesday, Austin public health officials announced more than a third of the young people who took the trip had tested positive for the coronavirus. https://t.co/PDB9dUiAf6
— Eugene Scott (@Eugene_Scott) April 1, 2020
A portion of the group returned back to Texas on separate commercial flights 10 days later and were met with enhanced health screenings. They found 28 of them tested positive for COVID-19 and are now in self-isolation.
The other 42 are currently under public health investigation and are in quarantine at the time. The others are being monitored and tested to see if they are also infected with the disease. The entire group was tracked using flight manifests from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
“The virus often hides in the healthy and is given to those who are at grave risk of being hospitalized or dying,” Austin-Travis County Interim Health Authority Dr. Mark Escott told AustinTexas.gov. “While younger people have less risk for complications, they are not immune from severe illness and death from COVID-19.”
Even though 45% of the people hospitalized in the United States are over the age of 65 and 80% of the deaths are over the age of 65 as well, experts believe it is likely that the young and healthy are the ones doing a majority of the spreading. According to Worldometers, as of April 1st, 2020, there are 199,425 confirmed cases of people with COVID-19 and a total of 4,383 deaths.