The Young Cut Loose in Myrtle Beach. The Virus Followed Them Home.
... Dozens of people who came to Myrtle Beach from West Virginia tested positive for the coronavirus after they returned home. Three separate clusters of COVID-19 cases in Kentucky and at least one in Ohio have been linked to returning visitors. Public health officials across Virginia have reported similar cases. More than 20 student athletes in South Carolina contracted the virus on a trip to the coast. And those are just some of the clusters that have popped up.
Officials in other states are starting to warn people to stay away from Myrtle Beach, and United Airlines has stopped flying there for the summer. “If I were you, I would consider going somewhere else,” Gov. Jim Justice of West Virginia said last week at a news conference.
That kind of message is tough to hear in a city that depends heavily on summer tourism, hospitality, relaxation and fun.
“It isn’t Myrtle Beach’s fault,” said Rusty Trull, 64, a cashier at the Gay Dolphin Gift Cove. “You’ve got these people coming on weekends, kind of messing everything up.”
Gregg Smith, a City Council member, said the trouble was that young visitors were clearly not taking enough precautions to ensure their own safety. “Young people feel invincible,” he said.
Most visitors on the boardwalk this week wore sandals or flip-flops, but very few were wearing masks, even while brushing shoulders with other tourists. Sidewalks on the city’s main drag were often too crowded for social distancing, as people ambled by with drinks in hand beneath a canopy of neon signs and palm trees.
Mayor Brenda Bethune suggested in an interview that for all anyone knew, visitors could be bringing the virus to Myrtle Beach, not the other way around. She complained that news accounts had unfairly tarred the city with all of the cases in surrounding Horry County. And she bridled at the warnings from Justice and others.
“I would never go on TV and blame our problems on someone else,” she said.
South Carolina emerged relatively unscathed from the first few months of the pandemic, but reports of new cases began climbing rapidly in June, as they did in many parts of the South and the West. In Horry County, the figures have nearly quadrupled, according to the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control....
Tate Trogdon, 20, who was visiting from
North Carolina with a high school friend, had spent most of his trip swimming at the beach. Neither of them knew anyone who had contracted the virus, he said, so the threat seemed virtually nonexistent.
Sipping a Sprite, Derick Coleman, a 34-year-old graphic designer, said he really could not be bothered by the virus on his vacation.
“I’m just over it,” he said. “It’s exhausting.”
When Nicole Feijoo, 18, took a late-afternoon stroll on the boardwalk with five friends, none were wearing masks.
“I’ve never really cared about sickness,” said Feijoo, a criminal justice student at Mitchell Community College in
Statesville, North Carolina. Some of her friends occasionally wore masks to protect themselves, she said, but “I’d rather be able to still breathe — if I catch something, I catch something.”
