“COVID-19 has literally hit home,” Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said in a tweet. “I have had NO symptoms and have tested positive.”
Bottoms and her husband both have tested positive for the virus.
Bottoms, who is reportedly in the running to become the vice-presidential pick for Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, has been outspoken about how Georgia’s Republican governor has been handling the covid-19 pandemic. She urged Atlanta residents to stay home even while Gov. Brian Kemp was lifting restrictions. This caused Bottoms to receive threats, demanding her to reopen the city.
“There’s been no handbook for so many mayors and so many governors across this country dealing with covid-19 and now with the demonstrations that we are seeing around the country,” she said in a late June interview with CNN. “I think that there has been a response to crisis that not many people have been tested in this way in the same way that leaders across this country have been over the past several months.”
Atlanta was in the spotlight when a white police officer shot and killed Rayshard Brooks on June 12 after he fell asleep in his car in the restaurant’s drive-thru lane, CNBC reported. The scene has been the site of massive protests.
Both former officers involved in the incident were later charged.
Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 73: Jamarlin Martin Jamarlin makes the case for why this is a multi-factor rebellion vs. just protests about George Floyd. He discusses the Democratic Party’s sneaky relationship with the police in cities and states under Dem control, and why Joe Biden is a cop and the Steve Jobs of mass incarceration.
Bottoms said she received the news that both she and her husband were positive on June 6. They decided to get tested because her husband was sleeping more than normal, MSNBC reported.
“It’s a shock,” she said, noting that she initially thought her husband’s symptoms were due to allergies. “It leaves me at a loss for words.”
