Tag: Winter Party

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Miami Winter Party Attendee Dies Due To COVID-19

Israel Carreras (image via Facebook)
From WSVN in Miami:

Miami-Dade County has reported its first two coronavirus-related deaths, and one of them has been identified as a 40-year-old man with no prior health issues or complications, according to family members.

Israel Carreras was identified as the first death in Miami-Dade, Friday. Later that evening, a 79-year-old man was reported as the county’s second death.

Carreras succumbed to the virus after his friends said he contracted it during the Winter Party Festival in Miami, where several other cases of the virus had appeared.

Carreras’s partner, Franco Conquista, told WSVN he stayed with Carreras at his home, taking care of him for two days, as he also had been infected. Conquista says Carreras eventually found it difficult to breathe so he went to the hospital. But after four or five days the doctors put him in an induced coma because he was really agitated. The sleep state keeps patients who might be anxious about breathing from removing a respirator out of panic. Carreras never regained consciousness. The 40-year-old Cuban native had lived in South Florida for several years, and friends described him as a hard worker who often clocked in around 14 hours per day at a warehouse. He also drove as an Uber driver in order to save money to send to his family in Cuba each month. As Conquista is still self-isolating himself, he wants people to know “this is serious.” “They need to stay at home,” he told the news station. “It doesn’t just kill old people. This poor boy had only 40 years old. It can kill anybody, so just stay home and think of other people. Try to save other people’s lives. Just because you are not affected directly doesn’t mean that people are not suffering from this.”

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News Round-Up: March 20, 2020

Some news items you might have missed: • InstaHunks: Woofy Steve_in_LA (above) looks handsome as ever self-isolating in style as he works from home. • LGBTQ Nation: At least four LGBTQ people who were at the Winter Party – a huge circuit party held in Miami earlier this month – have been diagnosed with COVID-19. Other partiers have also developed symptoms. • CNBC: The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed 913 points lower, or more than 4%, after rallying more than 400 points earlier in the day. The S&P 500 slid 4.4%. The Nasdaq Composite closed 3.8% lower after jumping more than 2%. • KIT212: Kenneth’s weekly round-up of the what’s what in local gay rags like Scissor Sister’s lead singer Jake Shears in the latest issue of GRAB. • Washington Post: U.S. intelligence agencies were issuing ominous, classified warnings in January and February about the global danger posed by the coronavirus while President Trump and lawmakers played down the threat and failed to take action that might have slowed the spread of the pathogen, according to U.S. officials familiar with spy agency reporting. • CNN: Economists at Goldman Sachs predict next week’s unemployment report will show 2.25 million Americans filing for their first week of unemployment benefits this week — eight times the number of people who filed last week and the highest level on record. • New Music: Scottish singer/writer ONR (pronounced “honor”) shares new track and video “Human Enough,” the latest from his forthcoming Must Stop EP.

ONR says of the new track: “I liked the idea that ‘being human’ wasn’t a defining quality, but rather a sliding-scale… that you could consider yourself ’not human enough’ to be someone else’s equal. The video is dark, confused, frustrated; it exists within this fantastical alternative reality where the concept of being human is (literally) different from our own.”