Detroit may have dodged a Mardi Gras-sized bullet when the North American International Auto Show vacated its traditional January dates.

The U.S. wasn’t as focused yet on COVID-19, but the virus was an epidemic in China. An international event, the auto show would have drawn hundreds of engineers, executives and journalists from that region, packing them into a petri-dish-like environment with people from more than 50 countries, including the U.S. and those from throughout southeast Michigan.

“It could’ve been a catastrophe,” said Dr. Peter Gulick, an infectious disease specialist at Michigan State University's College of Osteopathic Medicine about the timing of an outbreak in Detroit. “It was an environment for disaster. Detroit could’ve been the epicenter of COVID-19 for the whole country.”

Parallels to New Orleans, where a COVID-19 outbreak is believed to have begun and spread in February when visitors arrived for the city's Mardi Gras celebration, are inescapable.

In January, nobody in the U.S. was canceling events to prevent transmission.

Coronavirus seemed a distant threat. Event cancellations around the world didn’t begin till early March, with the Geneva auto show in Switzerland, the South by Southwest tech and entertainment conference in Austin, Texas, and National Basketball Association and National Hockey League games.

Spreading fast

By then, people exposed to the virus at a Detroit show might’ve been spreading the virus around the auto industry and the world for six weeks.

“Detroit could’ve been the second main hot spot behind Wuhan,” Gulick said.

As of Sunday, Michigan had 15,718 coronavirus cases and 617 deaths. Michigan has the third-highest number of cases and deaths in the nation, behind New York and New Jersey.

In Louisiana, where COVID-19 transmission and fatality rates have been compared with Italy, medical experts tracked the first reports to mid-March, a couple of weeks after Mardi Gras had drawn 1.4 million people to the city.

“By that point, it already had like two or three weeks to really go through the community, through the population, and therefore infect other people as well," Louisiana State University professor of epidemiology Dr. Susanne Straif-Bourgeois told the Lafayette, Louisiana, Daily Advertiser.

More: Detroit auto show canceled as TCF Center chosen for field hospital

More: Health experts see Mardi Gras link to Louisiana's COVID-19 spread

Ideal transmission conditions

Detroit’s TCF Center and the North American International Auto Show could have been an even more fertile ground for virus transmission than Mardi Gras. Both events last a couple of weeks, but NAIAS, as the show is called, draws more than 800,000 people during the show period to a single building, while Mardi Gras parades, balls and celebrations happen throughout New Orleans.

Wuhan is one of China’s automotive hubs, with assembly plants for GM, Fiat Chrysler, Honda, Renault, Peugeot, Nissan, multiple Chinese automakers and dozens of suppliers. Anybody involved with China’s auto industry can be expected to have direct or secondhand contact with Wuhan. In 2019, 200 journalists from China and, dozens of people from that country's automakers and suppliers and an unknowable number from global companies’ Chinese operations, attended NAIAS.

The show’s media and industry days, which precede its opening to the public, would’ve been ideal transmission conditions, said Linda Lee, chief medical affairs and scientific officer for UV Angel, a Grand Haven, Michigan-based technology company specializing in sterilization of air and surfaces from viruses and bacteria.

“It’s a great opportunity to bring an illness in and spread it among people from all over. And it doesn’t begin with the event. People come days in advance to set up for the show.”

NAIAS abandoned its January time slot for a move to June this year, when warm weather would allow test drives of new vehicles and demos of features like rock-climbing 4WD, electric cars and advanced safety systems. That new show was recently canceled as TCF converts to an emergency hospital.

We don’t know exactly when a January 2020 show would’ve taken place, but the dealers who run NAIAS like to be open on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a holiday when many families attend. MLK Day was Jan. 20 this year.

Let’s assume DADA scheduled the usual week of media and industry days before it, beginning Jan. 13, followed by the Charity Preview on Jan. 17 and opening to the public on Saturday, Jan. 18.

Media days attract 10,000 auto industry VIPs from around the world, 5,000 international journalists, sundry politicians for election-year photo opps, thousands of union workers to keep the lights on and AV systems humming, plus hundreds more for catering, security, maintenance and more.

Legendary for transmitting bugs

Personal space, much less social distancing, doesn’t exist during a news conference. Folding chairs are packed like sardines, executives and journalists crowd into small interview rooms and every formal presentation is followed by rugby-like scrums where journalists with follow-up questions surround executives literally shoulder-to-shoulder. There’s no escaping a sneeze or cough.

The January auto show already was legendary for transmitting bugs. Veterans laughed about “the Cobo crud,” the seemingly inevitable cough many dealt with after a couple of days crammed into the building formerly called Cobo Center.

Stir in a few hundred potential coronavirus carriers and the possibilities are frightening.

“There would’ve been people from all over the world packed in together before the gravity of the disease was understood,” Gulick said. “It would’ve caught us even more unprepared because no research or testing had taken place yet.”

And the nature of an international auto show would’ve primed the disease for maximum spread.

Visiting auto execs, engineers and journalists fill every hotel and restaurant in metro Detroit the week before the show opens to the public. The whole state, and potentially the global auto industry, could have been ravaged.

I could easily have come in contact with a dozen CEOs of global automakers and suppliers during media days. You lose count of executives a rung or two below. Following media days, 30,000 engineers take over, clambering over every new vehicle.

The annual Friday Charity Preview attracts about 13,000 auto industry figures, celebrities, national and local politicians and glitterati for three hours of cheek-kissing and back-slapping, followed by dinner and drinks.

And that’s all before the show would have opened to the public, when more than 100,000 people often pass through TCF’s doors in a day.

“I can’t even begin to estimate the impact,” MSU’s Gulick said. “The virus would’ve taken off like wildfire, nationally and internationally.”

Contact Mark Phelan: 313-222-6731 or mmphelan@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @mark_phelan. Read more on autos and sign up for our autos newsletter.