Some people just don’t get the dangers of the Coronavirus. Even if they are young healthy individuals who believe that it won’t kill them, they don’t realize they can cause its spread to millions of others. Such reckless abandon should be considered a crime during this time of global crisis. Thousands of young Americans just laughed-off the call to isolate and stay at home, and continued with their plans to party at Florida beaches for spring break like they normally do. But these are not normal times, several of these party animals soon enough tested positive for Covid-19.
The poster-child for the Covidiots was a spring-breaker from Ohio named Bradley Sluder, who told CBS news “If I get corona, I get corona. At the end of the day, I’m not gonna let it stop me from partying.” He had the nerve to add, “We’re just out here having a good time. Whatever happens, happens.” Hopefully the authorities make an example of him, whatever happens, happens.
You may be wondering how the irresponsible spring-break party animals were tracked after they left the Florida beaches. Tectonix, a data visualization company, used cell phone location data collected by company X-Mode to map out the travel patterns of thousands of spring-breakers. It uses special geo-spatial big-data analysis software. Talk about high tech, and how much data your phone can give off. Needless to say, the data provided, in near real-time, was anonymized.
It is heartbreaking how some radical youths don’t understand the seriousness of the problem, and undermine the efforts of many to stop the spread of the virus. They seem to just care about their trivial enjoyment, not realizing others have given their lives to try to stop the spread of the deadly COVID-19. Hopefully people around the world will learn from this, and future irresponsible acts are prevented.
