More than 70 people were infected by the coronavirus after attending a socially distant event at an Ohio winery — raising alarms about outbreaks in rural areas, according to a report.
Kati Finn and six of her friends were among those who tested positive for COVID-19 after visiting the Leisure Time Winery in Napoleon, where she and about 90 other guests played a game of “Name that tune” last month, according to the Wall Street Journal.
“It’s insane to me that we all got COVID-19 and yet everything seemed so safe there,” Finn, a middle-school secretary from Defiance, Ohio, told the paper. She said guests stayed six feet apart, and that servers all wore masks and gloves.
The vineyard outbreak is one reason rural Henry County has the state’s highest number of coronavirus infections, which tripled to 122 last month, according to the paper.
It’s part of a larger trend in which the virus has recently spread more rapidly in the rural Midwest, experts said. In Ohio, Missouri, Wisconsin and Illinois, for example, infections are spiking in counties with no major cities.
At the Ohio winery, it wasn’t clear whether participants played the game inside or outside, where experts say the virus is less likely to spread.
Finn, who suffered severe symptoms after the event, said she has since recovered.
