The mayor of Miami-Dade County, Florida, said Sunday that the Black Lives Matter protests spurred by the death of George Floyd “had a lot to do” with the recent spike in positive COVID-19 cases in the area.
Carlos Gimenez, a Cuban-American and member of the Republican Party, told CBS News’ Margaret Brennan that the protests were “obviously” a contributing factor in his county seeing an uptick in positive cases as Florida’s overall case count surged past 200,000.
“I think, obviously, the protests had a lot to do with it,” the mayor said. “We had, you know, thousands of young people together outside, a lot of them not wearing masks. And we know that you do that and you are talking and you are chanting, et cetera, that really spreads the virus.
“So absolutely, the protests had something to do with it,” he added. “I’m not saying it’s just that, but it is a contributing factor.”
Mr. Gimenez said Floridians, especially young people, started to let their guard down “around late May, early June” and started going out more despite it being “pretty locked down here for some time.”
Miami Police Chief Jorge Colina said last week that his department saw a significant increase in positive COVID-19 cases among officers who had worked at the protests, The Daily Wire reported.
“Last month, or perhaps less than a month ago, we had gotten down to where we had no employees in the police department sick with the virus,” Mr. Colina said. “Now I have 31 officers yet again who are COVID positive, I have six civilian employees who are COVID positive and I have 115 people quarantined right now because of COVID. Many of the officers that I have sick were part of those protest response teams. That’s not acceptable.”
