Why New Orleans Pushed Ahead With Mardi Gras, Even as It Planned for Coronavirus

A cache of internal emails reveals city officials believed chances were “low” that the festivities would help spread the virus, a prediction that proved tragically off base.

ATLANTA — Twelve days before New Orleans celebrated Mardi Gras Day, the citywide pre-Lenten bash that would pack thousands of visitors onto the streets, Sarah A. Babcock, the director of policy and emergency preparedness for the city health department, prepared a list of bullet points about the troubling disease that had already sickened thousands in China but had only infected 13 known patients in the United States.

“The chance of us getting someone with coronavirus is low,” Ms. Babcock advised community health providers, according to internal emails obtained by Columbia University’s Brown Institute for Media Innovation and reviewed by The New York Times.

The projection proved to be terribly off base, as New Orleans would soon erupt into one of the largest hot spots for the coronavirus in the U.S., with one of the nation’s highest death rates. Experts now believe that the multiweek Mardi Gras festivities likely served to accelerate the spread of the highly contagious disease in the New Orleans area.

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