“Until March 18 inclusive, live worship only. ” Delivered on the home page of the Evangelical Church website The Christian Open Door, place of worship in the popular district of Bourtzwiller, in Mulhouse (Haut-Rhin), the message requests the faithful to go their way to connect to the Holy Spirit from their home, via a computer screen.
This Pentecostal Church – a branch of Protestantism – was identified in early March as a major hotbed of coronavirus contamination. It has spread from Cotentin (Manche) to Corsica, via Guyana, since more than 2,000 people (including around 300 children) came from all over France, including overseas, and from neighboring countries like Switzerland, Belgium and Germany gathered there from February 17 to 24, as part of the Week of Fasting and Prayer.
It is during this traditional annual gathering, which The Christian Open Door has been organizing for twenty-five years during Lent, that dozens of faithful have been infected with SARS-CoV-2, exporting it upon their return to territories hitherto spared.
In connection with the event, at the end of the week there were at least twenty-five cases in Burgundy-Franche-Comté, five in Guyana, five in Corsica, three in Hautes-Alpes, three in Manche, two in Nouvelle- Aquitaine, one in Paris and one in the Center-Val de Loire region. A list probably far from exhaustive, because participation in the gathering did not imply any prior registration, which complicates the identification of other potential patients…
The pastor and a large part of his family infected
Among those already detected are Samuel Peterschmitt, pastor of the host church, as well as 20 members of his family. “We do not all live in the same house, but we were all, children and grandchildren, at the church during the Week of fasting and prayer”, explained to World by phone Jonathan Peterschmitt, one of the six children of the head of the Mulhouse church.
Since March 2, Jonathan, a 33-year-old general practitioner, has been confined, with his wife and their four children aged 1, 3, 5 and 7, to his home in Haut-Rhin, one of the departments today most affected with Oise. The number of its infected inhabitants was, Sunday, March 8, 162 cases, including that of the deputy Les Républicains Jean-Luc Reitzer, 68 years old and hospitalized in a “Serious condition” at the Mulhouse hospital.
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