Superspreaders: Socialist Venezuela Tries to Break Record for World’s Largest Orchestra

CARACAS, VENEZUELA - NOVEMBER 13: Musicians of Venezuela's National System of Youth Orches
Manaure Quintero/Getty
Frances Martel

Doctors expressed alarm and urged monitoring participants in a 12,000-person-strong attempt to break the Guinness World Record for world’s largest orchestra in Venezuela this weekend, the outlet Runrunes reported on Tuesday, citing coronavirus concerns.

Experts outside of the country have speculated that Venezuela may be experiencing one of the world’s most severe coronavirus outbreaks since the pandemic began in early 2019. The country is particularly vulnerable to catastrophe due to its collapsed healthcare system and starving populace, a hallmark of its “Bolivarian socialism” regime.

The Nicolás Maduro dictatorship has repeatedly insisted its coronavirus situation is under control, but official government case numbers are significantly lower than those of neighboring free states Colombia and Brazil, leading many to suspect a regime cover-up. Local polls also indicate that the vast majority of people told they have contracted Chinese coronavirus did not receive PCR tests, meaning they do not appear in official statistics.

The Maduro regime claims it has vaccinated 74 percent of the country’s population, another dubious assertion given widespread reports that vaccination sites overbooked appointments and the regime has hoarded vaccines for its most powerful members. Even if true, the regime has deployed the use of some of the world’s least reliable vaccine products, such as those from Russia and Cuba.

Maduro himself applauded efforts on Saturday to break the Guinness record as a “miracle.”

“Once the event to break the record and enter the Guinness [World] Book, we recommend … monitor signs if you are symptomatic, maintain or increase preventative measures for participants for 14 days, demand another antigen test,” the United Doctors of Venezuela, an organization representing the country’s health professionals, warned on Tuesday. The group noted that, as many participants in the event were students, Venezuelan schools should especially impose increased coronavirus preventative measures for the next 14 days.

Runrunes noted on Tuesday that the gigantic orchestral performance occurred at the Venezuelan Military Academy. Experts have warned for the past two years that academic institutions, given the nature of housing and life there, have a higher susceptibility to coronavirus outbreaks than less densely populated locations.

“The issue is that it was a mass event that occurred in the middle of the COVID-19 [Chinese coronavirus] pandemic that, in the case of Venezuela, has not yielded and continues to log new cases daily,” Runrunes observed.

The event occurred outside and brought together 12,067 musicians, according to the Military Academy. While an outdoor event – which makes contracting coronavirus less likely – the sheer size of the event makes an outbreak more probable. India, for example, experienced a spike in coronavirus cases after a Hindu festival along the Ganges River in March that attracted hundreds of thousands of people into a tightly packed, albeit outdoor, space.

 Delcy Rodriguez (2 from Left) vice president of Venezuela and defense minister Vladimir Padrino (2 from Right) take part in a ceremony at Patio de Honor de la Academia Militar on November 13, 2021 in Caracas, Venezuela. Venezuelan National Orchestra Organization and youth choirs make an attempt to break the current Guinness World record gathering over 12,000 musicians to play together. (Manaure Quintero/Getty Images)

The act of playing musical instruments, which requires breathing deeply in an enclosed space, also raises concerns. A study published in June from the University of Bristol found, however, that playing brass and woodwind instruments generates less aerosol than speaking or singing and “is no different than a person breathing.” Another study from the University of Utah found that coronavirus risks from orchestras could be mitigated by rearranging seating so that percussionists sit in the middle and woodwind and brass instruments are located on the outside of the orchestra.

“By simply changing the seating and opening doors and windows, performance spaces can reduce the probability of infection by a factor of 100,” Smithsonian noted, citing the study.

Saturday’s event was so large that discerning the seating arrangements from video is difficult, but the organizers appeared to have played instruments like oboes, French horns, and flutes in a central location. Among the players featured in the 12,000-strong crowd is the dictator’s son, lawmaker Nicolás Maduro Guerra, playing the flute seated behind a row of violins.

The orchestra attempted to break a record set by a group organized by Russian state-owned gas company Gazprom in 2019 consisting of 8,097 people. The Guinness World Records typically has ten days to verify if the Venezuelan attempt surpassed the current record holder.

The Maduro regime has logged a total of 421,311 cases of coronavirus and 5,040 deaths since the pandemic began. In comparison, neighboring Venezuela has documented 5 million cases of coronavirus and upwards of 127,000 deaths; Brazil’s cases inched towards 22 million as of Wednesday.

The United Doctors of Venezuela, which urged protective coronavirus protocol for orchestra participants, asserted in June that it had reason to believe that the Maduro regime’s statistics were a lie.

“They manipulated the reality of the healthcare system. They manipulated the cases. They manipulated the hospitalizations. They manipulated the deaths,” a statement posted to the group’s social media post at the time read. “They are now manipulating the vaccination rates.”

As of Monday, Maduro claimed that 74 percent of Venezuelans are vaccinated.

“We are the Best Country in the world!” Maduro posted on Twitter.

The regime announced the use of “Soberana 2,” a Cuban experimental vaccine product not yet approved by the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) for children as young as two years old last week. Adults have struggled for months, however, with the regime’s vaccine distribution process, which witnesses say has resulted in overbooking of vaccine appointments that lead to citizens standing in line for hours only to be abruptly told that the vaccines mysteriously ran out.

Mass vaccination in the country is expected to precede the debut of a vaccine passport mobile app that uses a “stoplight” system to control citizens’ mobility. Fully vaccinated citizens would receive a green light on the application, which allows them to patronize restaurants and other businesses. The regime has largely failed to implement the system, however, due to the fact that much of the country has no reliable access to electricity and regime bureaucracy effectively abandoned businesses that signed up to use the program.

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