It took just one night at the bar for Erika Crisp and 15 friends to get infected with coronavirus.
Celebrating at Lynch’s Irish Pub on June 6 in Jacksonville Beach after months of assiduously following quarantine rules, Crisp, a 40-year-old health care worker, let her precautions lapse.
“And then the first night we go out, Murphy’s Law, I guess,” Crisp told WJXT-TV. “The only thing we have in common is that one night at that one bar.”
Now Crisp has been sick for eight days, short of breath, and 15 of her friends have also tested positive for the novel coronavirus, WJXT reported.
Lynch’s shut down over the weekend for a deep cleaning after learning of the customers’ diagnosis, the general manager told the station.
“I think we were careless and we went out into a public place when we should not have,” Crisp told WJXT of their trip down Denial Lane. “And we were not wearing masks. I think we had a whole ‘out of sight, out of mind’ mentality. The state opens back up and said everybody was fine, so we took advantage of that.”
Crisp’s experience and that of her friends is exactly the type of scenario that epidemiologists have been warning against and trying to avoid. Coronavirus is very contagious, and the potential for infecting large numbers of people before knowing you are sick is the hidden danger of this pathogen.
Lynch’s went on to test all its employees, and seven of them were positive too. All had worked on June 6, General Manager Keith Doherty told WTLV-TV. The bar spent $7,000 on deep cleaning and was set to reopen Tuesday, he told the station, but with temperature checks for employees and possibly for customers as well.
Two other bars have closed after owner Fernando Meza learned that some customers had tested positive for coronavirus. Bars and restaurants elsewhere in the state have also had to close temporarily for cleaning after learning of infections among customers, employees or both, the Associated Press reported.
“We are taking precautionary measures to ensure the well-being of our staff and guests,” Meza, who owns The Tavern on 1st and The Wreck Tiki Bar, told WTLV.
Florida is among a number of states seeing alarming spikes in coronavirus cases as they reopen, many health officials say, prematurely.
Crisp cautioned against complacency.
“We should be wearing masks. We should be social distancing,” Crisp told WJXT. “It was too soon to open everything back up.”
Kat Layton, who also contracted coronavirus at the bar, now has firsthand knowledge of how easy it is to transmit without knowing you have it.
“It’s not about how you feel always, because you could be contracting this disease and giving it out without showing any symptoms,” she told WTLV, . “If we’re not paying attention to what is actually going on and we’re just kind of opening things up, we’re going to contract it and we’re going to kill people in our own community.”
