Southern Baptist Convention sparks small COVID-19 cluster in Nashville – Tennessean

A small but worrisome coronavirus cluster has been linked to the Southern Baptist Conventions annual meeting in Nashville, the first large-scale conference held in the city after it lifted restrictions on gatherings, according to the Metro Public Health Department.

About eight to 10 infections have been detected among attendees since the event in mid-June, which is enough to be classified as an COVID-19 cluster, said Metro Health epidemiologist Leslie Waller.

The cluster is almost certainly larger but difficult to measure because most attendees live outside of Tennessee, Waller said. The Centers of Disease Control and Prevention have issued an alert asking health officials in other states to contact Metro Health if they discover more infections that trace back to the Baptist event.

We have eight to 10 cases confirmed, Waller said. Do we assume there are more? Yes. Can we give you any idea as to how many more? No, we cant.

The Southern Baptist Conventions annual meeting, a two-day event at which Baptist churchgoers elected leaders and debated controversial topics, drew more than 15,000 attendees to Music City Center starting on June 15. Tensions ran high as attendeestackled critical race theory, sexual abusein the church, and staved off an effort to push the conservative denomination even further to the right.

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Waller said the cluster is large enough to justify notifying the thousands of people who attended the event. Jonathan Howe, a spokesman for the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee, said the organization hadn'talerted attendees and was working with city and state health officials to identify its next steps.

It is not yet known if any of the cluster involves the delta variant, a more transmissible version of the coronavirus, Waller said. Variant strains can only be identified if virus samples are subjected to a secondary level of testing known as genomic sequencing, which is performed only sparingly.

The Baptist event was a long-awaited revival of Nashvilles lucrative convention industry, which normally brings a steady stream of tourists to the city for work and play. Before the pandemic, conferences like this accounted for 40% of Nashvilles tourism businesses, said Butch Spyridon, CEO of the Nashville Convention and Visitors Corp., while speaking in May in anticipation of the gathering.

But the event also poised a clear infection risk amid a smoldering pandemic, particularly because Nashville lifted its mask mandate and gathering restrictions one month prior.Few attendees wore masks at the event and social distancing was all but non-existent inside Music City Center.

The gathering is also likely to have attracted a less-vaccinated crowd. The Southern Baptist Convention is a network of conservative evangelical churches, and public polling has found the highest levels of vaccine hesitancy among evangelical conservatives, particularlyin Southern states.

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Howe said the event followed virus protocols put forth by health departments and provided special seating for attendees who preferred to wear masks and remain distanced.

The Nashville meeting was the largest gathering of the Southern Baptist Convention since 1995, drawing more than 15,700 voting attendees, plus guests, from all 50 states, according to The Baptist Press, a publication run by the convention. The pandemic forced the convention to cancel its meeting in 2020, so the Nashville event was the first such gathering since a meeting in Birmingham, Alabama in 2019.

Brett Kelman is the health care reporter for The Tennessean. He can be reached at 615-259-8287 or at brett.kelman@tennessean.com. Follow him on Twitter at @brettkelman.

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Southern Baptist Convention sparks small COVID-19 cluster in Nashville - Tennessean