A month after SC shag gathering, at least 5 dead and 20 test positive for COVID-19
Nearly one month after an unofficial North Myrtle Beach shag dancing festival, at least three more people who attended have died and another six have tested positive for COVID-19.
Those deaths and illnesses are in addition to 14 other previously confirmed cases of COVID-19 related to the September event, Shaggin’ On Main. The Sun News previously reported that two other people died in the weeks after the festival, though it remains unclear if their deaths were caused by COVID-19.
Attendees and people close to them began testing positive for the highly-infectious virus just days after the festival ended. In the past week, the virus claimed the lives of Jeptha “Jeppy” McDowell and Donald “Tootie” Brown, according to friends and family.
McDowell was a longtime shag dance instructor at Fat Harold’s Beach Club, and Brown was a DJ who played at multiple shag events over the years in North Myrtle Beach. Two other musicians who performed at the festival, including Jimmy Weaver of the Holiday Band, have also died, though it is unclear if their deaths were caused by COVID-19.
A fifth person also died after attending the festival and contracting COVID-19, according to Facebook posts from family members and funeral records. The Sun News is not naming this person because reporters were unable to contact relatives.
The infections and deaths come as Horry County has seen a spike in coronavirus cases in recent weeks. The South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control reported more than 1,500 positive virus cases since the start of the month.
At the same time, Horry County officials are allowing their requirement that face masks be worn in businesses to expire, and while local officials acknowledged that large gatherings of people can easily spread the virus, they said they were unable to stop Shaggin’ On Main or enforce the mask mandate during the event. While North Myrtle Beach has its own face mask mandate in place, there have been no punishments to businesses or attendees, there or elsewhere in Horry County, and state health officials have been muted in response to questions about infections among event attendees.
Health department officials said they were aware of fewer than five cases traced to shag dancing venues including Duck’s Beach Club, OD Pavilion, Murphy’s On The Beach and Harold’s on the Ocean. DHEC has declined to name any specific event or businesses that could have caused the spike in cases.
People visiting a certain location does not necessarily mean anyone contracted COVID-19 at those places, DHEC said in a statement.
“We’re refraining from announcing cases associated with individual places of businesses unless doing so would be necessary to protect public health due a massive exposure event,” the department said. “We expect the number of cases for any county to fluctuate and there aren’t always identifiable factors that contribute to an increase in a particular area.”
DHEC said it had performed contact tracing related to Shaggin’ On Main but believes the event did not appear to be a source of the recent virus increase in Horry County.
DHEC’s finding that fewer than five recent positive cases visited businesses associated with Shaggin’ On Main stands at odds with The Sun News’ reporting that nearly two dozen people tested positive for COVID-19 after attending the event. Though, some who contracted the illness could have tested positive in other states, such as North Carolina, where many attendees of the event came from, preventing them from being included in the health department’s totals.
Longtime shag dance club Duck’s Night Life spearheaded Shaggin’ On Main and received an event permit from the state prior to opening. Duck’s owner, Dwayne Porter, said last week he was within his legal rights to host the event and took precautions by taking customers’ temperatures at the door.
Text messages seeking comment were sent to Dwayne and Robin Porter on Thursday. Robin Porter, who co-owns Duck’s, responded to a text message Thursday morning saying Duck’s did not have further comment.
Messages seeking comment by The Sun News were left Thursday with Murphy’s On The Beach.
Harold Worley, an Horry County Council member and landlord for OD Pavilion and Harold’s On The Ocean, said while those businesses were open during the Shaggin’ On Main event, he is only aware of one OD Pavilion employee who tested positive for COVID-19. He was not aware of any other cases.
Pavilion and Harold’s closed their doors for the winter season last week, Worley said. Worley also owns both popular shag venues Fat Harold’s Beach Club and the Spanish Galleon, which have been closed since March due to the pandemic.
For the businesses that were open during last month’s event, Worley said Thursday they needed to operate during the Shaggin’ On Main weekend or else they would have gone under.
“Do I think they should have closed? No. If we close, we’re done,” he said.
Ray Williams, an owner of the nearby OD Arcade and Lounge, another popular shag venue, said his business did not participate in the Shaggin’ On Main event and had its dance floor closed due to the pandemic.
‘My friends are dying’
In interviews, relatives, friends and fellow shag dancers spoke with The Sun News to confirm the infections and deaths but also described a tight-knit community of middle-aged and elderly performers who express themselves and the love of others with a step accompanied by a drumbeat. Many of them now talk constantly and monitor things on Facebook, often sharing stories about their friends and dance partners.
“My friends are dying. It’s the worst I’ve ever seen,” said Lulu Quick, the longtime general manager of Fat Harold’s, which has remained closed since March due to the pandemic. “If only everyone had been a little more careful.”
The recent deaths came in quick succession. McDowell, the shag instructor, died on Saturday, Oct. 17, two weeks after being diagnosed with COVID-19. He spent his final days in intensive care, and he needed a ventilator to breathe, said Susan Neal, a close friend.
Brown, the DJ, died the night of Oct. 18, according to Quick. Brown’s wife, Maxine, also tested positive for COVID-19 and remains in intensive care, Quick said.
A longtime DJ at the shag bars and clubs in North Myrtle Beach, Brown was a part of Fat Harold’s family, Quick said. Fat Harold’s is one of the most well-known gathering places for dancers in the shag community.
“Tootie played for us for years, always had a smile on his face and always had a joke. He had more jokes than Carter has liver pills,” she said. “His personality and my personality, we just clicked.”
McDowell was a shag dance instructor in North Myrtle Beach for 40 years. He taught thousands of people how to do the Carolina shag. His friends and family remembered him as a private and intelligent man.
“He was someone I could have fun with. He was someone who always looked after me, and I looked after him,” Neal said of their decades-long friendship.
‘We were too cool to wear masks’
Shaggin’ On Main at Duck’s Night Life attracted hundreds of dancers from around the eastern United States.
Richard Hewitt, of Raleigh, was one of those out-of-state attendees who got sick. He got into shag dancing in the 1990s and came to North Myrtle Beach for Shaggin’ On Main with several friends, including one from New York.
Over the course of about a week, Hewitt said he and his friends visited several clubs and bars, including Duck’s. He believes he caught the virus at Duck’s because he was there on a night the club had more than 200 customers.
After he left the area, Hewitt said he started feeling sick, including a fever and a stomachache. But he thought it might just be a cold caught from being around so many other shag dancers, something that had happened before.
By Oct. 2, he tested positive for COVID-19. Five of the friends he saw at the festival also tested positive, and two ended up in the hospital, Hewitt said. He’s feeling better and said he has no regrets about going or getting sick.
“We were too cool to wear masks,” he said, adding that he doesn’t blame Duck’s for hosting the event. “I appreciated that they were the only big club that was open. I don’t want to say anything but positive things about Duck’s.
“Would I do it again? Most certainly,” he said.
Mask rules in flux
As more and more reports appeared about people testing positive for COVID-19 after attending Shaggin’ On Main, some ending up in ICUs on ventilators and others dying after contracting the virus, many in the community questioned if the event was a so-called “superspreader,” according to social media posts, interviews and emails reviewed by The Sun News.
Due to attendees and performers participating in the festival for multiple days at different locations, the COVID-19 outbreak associated with Shaggin’ On Main may never be called a true “superspreader’‘ event.
DHEC said there is no universal definition for what the term means. But, an event that causes “at least eight transmissions of the disease were documented from a single event exposure from a single person” is one definition developed by scientists in the early 2000s.
Despite the number of cases and deaths, there is currently no evidence that Shaggin’ On Main fits that definition.
Yet, even as North Myrtle Beach deals with a growing number of positive virus cases, the state of face mask requirements remains in flux.
Horry County Council voted Tuesday let its mask mandate expire after Oct. 30. That mask mandate repeal affects all of unincorporated Horry County — not Myrtle Beach, North Myrtle Beach or the other incorporated towns and cities, some of which have their own local rules on masks. But, the move lends itself to confusion, since people may not always be aware of when they are in city or county limits.
“I’ve always said, if you start walking down the beach, you might change from one town to a city to another town to a city, and everyone has different laws,” Horry County Council Chairman Johnny Gardner told reporters Tuesday. “So yeah, it might be confusing, but what I would suggest to anyone who’s getting confused is wear your mask.”
North Myrtle Beach renewed its mask mandate Monday, which requires anyone inside a business to wear a mask. The exception, which Shaggin’ On Main fell under, is that restaurant customers do not have to wear a mask at any point.
“There is no realistic expectation that the city can enforce a customer face-covering law in that particular environment,” city spokesman Pat Dowling said in an email.
The ordinance is also complaint-based, not enforcement-based, though government records show that mask-related complaints tend to be few and far between. Dowling said law enforcement cannot be solely in charge of enforcing the ordinance without neglecting other duties, leaving code enforcement to handle the complaints.
Code enforcement does “respond to face-coverings complaints but we do not have enough of them to hang out all day and all night in bars and restaurants watching and waiting for an employee or customer to break the face-coverings law,” Dowling said.
City councilwoman Nikki Fontana echoed Dowling’s emphasis on personal responsibility when it comes to mask wearing and safety. In an interview Friday, she said that while she doesn’t want to wear a mask, she does it anyway to stay safe, just like the older residents of her town who plan on when it’s best to go out to avoid crowds.
And as for the unsafe environment at Shaggin’ On Main, Fontana said, “We all have to make decisions, and I wouldn’t have been in that situation.”
Photos from Shaggin’ On Main posted to Facebook show few, if any, people wearing a mask. Event attendees confirmed such an environment at Duck’s and other venues, with few people wearing masks and many not bothering to socially distance as recommended by national health and safety guidelines. The event did not require a city permit, however, “when the City has the authority to do so, it does not allow these types of events,” Dowling said.
Even with the magnitude of the outbreak, Dowling insisted that the city’s mask wearing rules are working, citing that 0.51% of the city’s 15,000 residents have tested positive for the virus.
Local hospitals see spike in COVID-19 patients
Most area hospitals have seen an increase in the number of COVID-19 patient admissions in recent weeks.
Tidelands Health has 29 COVID-19 patients, including four in the ICU and three on ventilators. While this represents only 21% of its ventilators, Tidelands’ ICUs are currently filled well beyond their capacity, mostly due to non-coronavirus patients.
“Our region has seen a clear upward trend in COVID-19 hospitalizations over the past three weeks that’s very concerning,” Tidelands spokeswoman Dawn Bryant said in a statement. “We need the community’s help to slow the spread of this highly contagious virus.”
Despite seeing fewer patients overall, Conway Medical Center reported having the most people in the ICU. Its most recent weekly average number of patients included 18 with COVID-19, five of whom were in the ICU.
McLeod Health did not provide specific numbers but said it has seen an uptick in the number of COVID-19 patients since mid-September “as predicted by the CDC as an outcome from a combination of factors including schools, fall activities, PPE fatigue, etc.”
Grand Strand Health has seen nearly twice as many patients admitted for COVID-19 so far this month compared to all of September. It currently has two positive patients in the ICU with one on a ventilator.
However, Grand Strand infectious disease expert Kevin Shea echoed DHEC in saying that a trend in recent virus cases cannot be attributed to one event or location.
“We are actively monitoring the spike in COVID-19 cases and continue to work with our SCDHEC, SCHA and EMD partners to prepare for any potential surge we may see in the future,” he said. “Just as we did early this year, we will implement a surge plan when it is necessary to do so.”
Editor’s note: If you have first-hand information regarding this story and would like to speak to a reporter, please contact J. Dale Shoemaker at dshoemaker@thesunnews.com or Chase Karacostas at ckara@thesunnews.com.
This story was originally published October 23, 2020 at 4:48 PM.
