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. 2022 Sep 6;10(9):1484.
doi: 10.3390/vaccines10091484.

The Impact of the Patras Carnival on the Course of the COVID-19 Pandemic and the Outbreak of Influenza A: A Multicenter Cross-Sectional Study

Christos Sotiropoulos  1 , Vasileios Loulelis  2 , Anna Mastorakou  3 , Eleni Adamopoulou  4 , Theoharis Kortesas  5 , Aimilia Dimitropoulou  6 , Eleni Blika  2 , Ioanna Papadimitriou-Olivgeri  3 , Ilona Binenbaum  7
Affiliations

The Impact of the Patras Carnival on the Course of the COVID-19 Pandemic and the Outbreak of Influenza A: A Multicenter Cross-Sectional Study

Christos Sotiropoulos et al. Vaccines (Basel). .

Abstract

Background: We investigated the impact of the indoor mass gathering of young people during the Patras Carnival in Greece on the course of the COVID-19 pandemic and the influenza A epidemic. Materials and Methods: For influenza A, we tested 331 subjects with high fever (>38 °C), who arrived at five separate private laboratories over a two-week period after the carnival, via rapid test. One hundred and eighty-eight of them were young adults (17−35 years old), all unvaccinated against influenza A but all immunized against SARS-CoV-2, either through vaccination or previous infection. For the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, we tested 2062 subjects at two time periods, two weeks before and two weeks after the carnival, also via rapid test. Additionally, we examined 42 samples positive for influenza A and 51 samples positive for SARS-CoV-2 for the possibility of co-infection via molecular testing (i.e., RT-PCR). Results: 177/331 (53.5%) subjects tested positive for influenza A, and 109/177 (61.6%) of the positive subjects were young adults, and 93/109 (85.3%) of these subjects were tested in the first week after the carnival. Additionally, 42 samples of those subjects were molecularly tested, and 5 were found negative for influenza A but positive for SARS-CoV-2. Regarding the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the increase in the positivity index for young adults between the pre-carnival and post-carnival periods was moderate. Conclusions: Our study indicates that the indoor mass gathering of young people during the carnival contributed to the outbreak of an influenza A epidemic and had a moderate but not statistically significant impact on the course of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, corroborating the crucial role of vaccination against the epidemic’s waves. It also showed the need for the use of high-quality rapid tests for their management.

Keywords: RT-PCR; SARS-CoV-2; carnival; influenza A; rapid tests; vaccination; young adults.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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