The Florida man who dressed up as the Grim Reaper to guilt those crowding the state’s reopened beaches is now protesting in large outdoor crowds.
Daniel Uhlfelder, a lawyer and graduate from the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law, posted images of himself at a Black Lives Matter protest in Defuniak Springs, Florida, on Sunday. In the photos, he can be seen wearing a shirt with the quotation, “I can’t breathe,” in reference to the words of 46-year-old black man George Floyd, who died after a police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes, and others killed in police custody.
“Huge crowd. Stay hopeful and stay strong,” Uhlfelder tweeted, earlier posting videos of his family attending the protests with him and thousands of other people.
Defuniak springs, Florida. Huge crowd. Stay hopeful and stay strong. pic.twitter.com/xKlNWF6EFw
— Daniel Uhlfelder (@DWUhlfelderLaw) June 7, 2020
Throughout the month of May, Uhlfelder shamed people who visited the beaches in his state as coronavirus social distancing protocols implemented across the country forced businesses to close and limited many social gatherings.
“Stay home Florida,” Uhlfelder tweeted then, later posting he was “providing free body bags to beachgoers.”
Stay home Florida pic.twitter.com/MV4fyAXvwu
— Daniel Uhlfelder (@DWUhlfelderLaw) May 1, 2020
We are out providing free body bags to beachgoers today pic.twitter.com/kQd09uFFEC
— Daniel Uhlfelder (@DWUhlfelderLaw) May 26, 2020
On Monday, the National Bureau of Economic Research announced the United States entered an economic recession beginning in the month of February, attributing the cause to lockdowns imposed as a response to the novel coronavirus pandemic.
“The unprecedented magnitude of the decline in employment and production, and its broad reach across the entire economy, warrants the designation of this episode as a recession, even if it turns out to be briefer than earlier contractions,” the bureau of economists said in their report.
During a press conference on Monday, Maria Van Kerkhove, head of the World Health Organization’s emerging diseases and zoonosis division, also dismissed concerns that asymptomatic carriers of the coronavirus could widely spread COVID-19, which was once a motivating justification behind public policy guidance from public health officials.
“From the data we have, it still seems to be rare that an asymptomatic person actually transmits onward to a secondary individual,” she said. “We have a number of reports from countries who are doing very detailed contact tracing. They’re following asymptomatic cases. They’re following contacts. And they’re not finding secondary transmission onward. It’s very rare.”
