A report issued by the nation’s top health agency this week says Mardi Gras likely accelerated the spread of the new coronavirus in Louisiana, but the agency conceded it did not advise anyone in the U.S. to consider canceling large events until more than two weeks after the famed New Orleans street party.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report, issued Friday, supports claims made by Gov. John Bel Edwards and New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell that the country’s leading medical experts never warned them to cancel parades or other large Carnival gatherings because of the deadly respiratory sickness.

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The CDC report mainly explores why COVID-19 spread at drastically different rates in individual communities across the country once U.S. health experts detected local transmission of the disease in late February in California.

Densely populated areas — including New York City and Washington D.C. — were likely hit particularly hard because of how contagious respiratory droplets are in those who are infected, the report said.

Louisiana emerged as one of the pandemic’s hotspots as well, reporting more than 20,000 stricken and 806 dead as of Saturday. The report’s authors note that the state had a “temporarily” increased population density when Mardi Gras celebrations in February attracted an influx of visitors to New Orleans and surrounding areas.

However, the report also made it a point to note that this past Mardi Gras season — concluding on Feb. 25 — unfolded at a time when canceling festivals, conferences and sporting events “was not yet common in the United States.”

In fact, the agency said in the report, the CDC did not even advise event organizers to consider postponing or canceling gatherings of more than 250 people until March 12 — 16 days after Fat Tuesday and three days after Louisiana’s first known COVID-19 case was detected.

The impact of that recommendation — ultimately giving way to more strident social distancing measures, including an indefinite ban on gatherings of more than 10 — was immediate.

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On March 12, the governing body for college athletics canceled its immensely popular, lucrative men’s basketball championship tournament, nicknamed “March Madness.”

Additionally, on March 13, with just 33 confirmed cases statewide, Edwards ordered schools across Louisiana to close for at least a month. He is expected to extend that order for the rest of the academic year.

The CDC’s timeline for issuing its recommendations comes after Edwards and Cantrell — while pleading for additional medical resources to fight the pandemic — faced questions and criticism from the national news media about whether it would have been more responsible to nix the area’s signature celebration during the dawn of the local plague.

At one point, a CNN host pointed to a Washington Post article which mentioned that some American governors had been “rattled” after participating in a Feb. 9 briefing on COVID-19 with the CDC and the federal Department of Health and Human Services. At the time, COVID-19 was ravaging China.

Edwards, who participated in the briefing, and his staff have countered that a press statement issued by federal officials immediately following that briefing described the risk from COVID-19 to Americans as “low.”

“We’ve acted very quickly when we’ve had guidance,” Edwards’ deputy communications director, Christina Stephens, said Saturday. “The governor has been very decisive in his actions to say this is what we’re going to do and how long we’re going to be closed.”

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Stephens’ remarks came as Louisiana continued to see some gains from the social distancing measures the state began implementing four weeks ago.

Though the state saw cases increase by 761 and deaths by 51 on Saturday, the number of patients being kept alive by ventilators fell by nine. It was the sixth day in the last week that the state saw a decrease in that number, which stands at 470.

Meanwhile, the number of COVID-19 patients in hospitals — 2,067 — went up by 13, supporting growing evidence that hospital-bed usage by coronavirus patients is slowing.

Most coronavirus fatalities remain clustered in Orleans and Jefferson Parish. New Orleans had 5,535 known cases and 232 deaths as of Saturday, while Jefferson had 4,877 cases and 170 deaths.