U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn said this week that protestors caused an uptick in COVID-19 cases, and she even seemed to suggest that the media conceals that information.
Blackburn said this on her Facebook page. She said this while sharing a Washington Post article about how the United States has responded to COVID-19. The article criticized how U.S. President Donald Trump has handled the outbreak and suggested that not enough Americans are wearing masks to guard themselves against the virus.
“Not one mention of hundreds of thousands of protestors across the country taking to the streets and violating CDC guidelines for weeks,” Blackburn wrote.
“The protests, cheered by Democrats and the media, were the super spreader. But now that is conveniently censored.”
As reported, Meharry Medical College President James Hildreth warned at a press conference last month that people in Nashville who either attended or marched at any of the recent rallies are at risk of catching COVID-19.
Nashville Mayor Cooper attended a George Floyd rally at Legislative Plaza and, in so doing, seemed to violate his own restrictions on how many people may gather in one place. Several thousand people attended one George Floyd rally at Legislative Plaza. Cooper thanked many of them for wearing masks to protect themselves against the virus. But many of those people, especially those near the speaker’s platform, stood close to one another, by only a matter of inches — and not feet.
Hildreth called such rallies “the perfect storm for getting the virus transmitted.”
“My opinion has not changed and is shared by many other health care experts,” Hildreth said at the time.
“When you have thousands of people in close proximity to each other with a virus that has a prevalence somewhere between 1 percent and 5 percent, many people not wearing masks, yelling at the top of their lungs, creating aerosols, there is a great possibility that someone who came to the rally without the virus is going to leave the rally with the virus.”
Hildreth said at the time that he feared “a spike in cases,” not only in Nashville but in other cities that hosted George Floyd rallies.
As The Tennessee Star reported this month, Cooper said that “historically, demonstrations, in terms of contact tracing, have not led to an outbreak.”
The Star contacted Meharry Medical College Monday to ask Hildreth if his analysis has changed during the past month. MMC staff said Monday that Hildreth was unavailable to comment, but they also said they would forward our question to him.
As reported this month, there’s no way to know for certain if people in Nashville who caught COVID-19 are telling the truth when they said they didn’t march in any recent political rallies honoring George Floyd or Black Lives Matter.
The Tennessee Star asked Metro Health spokesman Brian Todd if county officials have any measures in place to make sure people who catch COVID-19 answer truthfully about their prior activities.
“The vast majority of these interviews with confirmed cases are conducted by phone,” Todd said in an emailed response.
“We hope that people will be honest when asked and understand the seriousness of the spread of this potentially deadly disease.”
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Chris Butler is an investigative journalist at The Tennessee Star. Follow Chris on Facebook. Email tips to [email protected].
People look it up. With all of the false numbers, with all that, the numbers have been up 3-10 days AFTER every protest, in every town. The data is a little hard to find, I am sure due to the people reporting the data wanting it to be hard to find, but it is there.
Why do you think that all of the people on lower Broadway over the week end were NOT written tickets or stopped? The number of people dieing is going down on all percentage levels.
Keeping the numbers up IS THE POINT.