Florida healthcare worker, 15 friends contract COVID-19 at bar

A Mayo Clinic worker who stayed indoors for months in Florida to avoid getting the coronavirus says she finally broke quarantine to go to a bar with pals earlier this month — leaving her and 15 of her friends with the contagion.

“The first night we go out — Murphy’s Law, I guess,” Erika Crisp, a 40-year-old healthcare worker from Jacksonville, told local WJXT TV.

“The only thing we have in common is that one night at that one bar,” Crisp said of herself and her sick pals.

“I think we were careless, and we went out into a public place when we should not have,” she said of the group’s excursion to the popular Lynch’s Irish Pub in Jacksonville Beach on June 6 — a day after most of Florida entered Phase Two of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ start-up plan, which included the reopening of bars.

After several months of properly social-distancing and “doing everything the right way,” Crisp said, the freedom of the moment may have gotten the better of her and her pals.

“We were not wearing masks,” she said. “I think we had a whole ‘out of sight, out of mind’ mentality.

“The state opens back up and said everybody was fine, so we took advantage of that.”