The Margin: Social distancing, this is not: Weekend revelers in U.S. cities not getting the public health message

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Twitter screen capture

‘It’s 8am. Every bar has a line,’ reads the caption on this tweeted Saturday image of a bar’s exterior in the River North section of Chicago.

In some ways — for instance, sparsely populated office cubicles and commodious downtown sidewalks toward the end of the workweek — the message from public health experts and local officials about effecting social distancing to curb the spread of the coronavirus appears to be sinking in. In other ways, less so.

An example of the latter came with this weekend’s socializing, particularly, according to anecdotal reporting, among youthful urban dwellers, from Boston and New York to Washington to Chicago and New Orleans and beyond.

In Chicago, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker was appealing to daytime revelers — for whom the St. Patrick’s Day parade and dyeing of the Chicago River would have been, along with all-day imbibing, Saturday’s organizing principles, had the first two entries in that trinity not been canceled — to do the public-spirited thing and “go home,” as the local news site Block Club reported.

Whistleblowers in many of the aforementioned localities emerged on Twitter — here’s a sample, starting with Chicago:

Washington:

Boston:

New Orleans:

Read on: Spain announces a lockdown, and France puts night life on pause

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