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.
A spokesman for the Nashville Metro Health Department said as much this week.
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.”
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.”
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Chris Butler is an investigative journalist at The Tennessee Star. Follow Chris on Facebook. Email tips to [email protected].
I am not inclined to be honest either and I certainly don’t want these people bothering my family or friends. If you early vote don’t tell them this either, they are going to use this as ammunition to push for the mail-in voting fraud.