Those partygoers in Washington state weren’t trying to get Covid-19 after all

So much for those “Covid-19 parties.”

Earlier this week, health officials in the Washington county of Walla Walla warned about reports of people attending parties to purposely get infected with Covid-19.

Now, they’ve walked back those claims, saying the partygoers weren’t intentionally trying to get infected with the disease in an effort to develop immunity.

The county announced on Monday that there were six more confirmed cases of coronavirus, bringing the total count to 94. One person has died, according to the county’s website.

Initially, Meghan DeBolt, director of the county’s Department of Community Health, told the Union-Bulletin that some of the cases could be traced back to Covid-19 parties, described as gatherings where noninfected people mingle with an infected person in an effort to catch the virus.

DeBolt later told The New York Times that officials were still learning more about the cases that had been traced to recent parties. While the health department was still hearing of reports of gatherings where infected people were present, it couldn’t prove that people attended because they intentionally wanted to contract the disease, the Times reported.

Still, DeBolt told CNN that the gatherings were against Washington state’s stay-at-home orders, which remain in effect until May 31.

Intentional infection has been a concern

Officials have been worried that people might gather in groups to purposefully become infected.

That’s because some people across the US believe that it is better to get infected with the virus and get it over with to faster reach herd immunity, the state at which the virus becomes less of a threat because the majority of the population has become immune to it.

But most experts recommend against that, saying that widespread infections would overwhelm hospitals and more people would die.

“The level of people who’ve been infected, I don’t expect it would rise to the level to give what we call herd immunity protection,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN’s Jim Sciutto in April.