A Florida friend group all tested positive for coronavirus after a night of hanging out at a recently reopened Florida bar.
The group of 16 friends gathered for a friend’s birthday at the crowded Lynch’s Irish Pub on June 6th in Jacksonville, Florida. Ericka Crisp, who is also in healthcare, was amongst the group. She says that she has been sick since the gathering.
“We were careless, and we went out into a public place before we should have, and we weren’t wearing masks,” she told the local news station WJXT.
Crisp, along with Kat Layton and Dara Sweat, spoke to CNN’s Chris Cuomo on Tuesday. They want to remind the public that the virus is still a large threat to the public and that it may be too soon to reopen bars and restaurants.
“We want to raise awareness and get ahead of it,” Layton told Cuomo. “We want to tell people it’s really not ready for what we thought it was ready for, it’s too soon.”
“Standing there in front of those people, we knew we were pushing it,” Layton said of the crowded bar.
Within days, the group began getting sick one by one.
“Receiving the text messages that my friends were just boom, positive, boom, positive, boom, positive, back to back to back, it was overwhelming,” Sweat said.
Eventually, the entire group tested positive, with some coming down with flu-like symptoms, while others got seriously ill.
All three women are confident that they contradicted the disease as a result of that outing. The friends have been contacted by strangers who also got sick after visiting the same bar during that same weekend.
“I feel foolish, it’s too soon,” Crisp said.
Seven employees at Lynch’s Irish Pub in Jacksonville Beach have also tested positive for COVID-19, causing the general manager to voluntarily shut down last weekend for extensive sanitizing measures.
Since Florida began to reopen businesses, the state has seen a record number of new cases on Monday, according to the Florida Department of Health.
