As mid-March approached, colleges and coastal cities garnered the inevitable support: swarms of students fresh out of Zoom School were doing barrels in a global pandemic.
In Florida, Palm Beach extended its curfew from 1 a.m. to 5 p.m. to deter prospective Spring Breakers. In Texas, a county judge reminded residents of last year when children with beer addicts caused several superspreader events. The University of California Davis even offered to pay students to stay home, though not by much – their ‘Spring Break Grants’, for which students had to apply, cost a $ 75 gift card to local businesses.
But the warnings did not deter the crowd from popular Spring Break destinations, from Miami to South Padre Island to Panama City.
“We are packed from time to time until we close,” Sydney, the manager of the Bacon Bitch Bitch Bitch in Miami Beach, told The Daily Beast on Saturday. The Spring Break hotspot is in the state with the country’s highest number of cases of the new British COVID variant. She estimates that the restaurant, with a capacity of about 175, has been serving ‘thousands’ since the beginning of March.
Other businesses in Miami Beach are also full – eight restaurants and clubs along the busy Ave Ave were too busy talking on the phone on Saturday. A spokesman for Yardbird Southern Table and Bar told The Daily Beast that they had had a “large influx of cases” over the past two weeks due to various Spring Breaks. At The Standard, a luxury hotel in the Biscayne Bay area of Miami Beach, a representative said their rooms were fully booked every weekend this month.
Among the largely maskless crowds on South Beach this week, an Alabama A&M junior at the Miami Herald: “Grandma should not be here anyway. That’s too many people. ”
Miami Beach police, who have stepped up their Spring Break actions in recent years, and even donned riot gear to intimidate parties, have dealt with the crowd with extremely violent use, which many say has historically targeted black tourists.
Friday night the MBPD tweeted that they were dealing with ‘very large crowds’, noting that they detained several people and were ‘forced to use peppercorns’ on civilians. One video shows how revealers work on a cop car. In another disturbing video, a large crowd of people can be seen spreading while half a dozen police officers descend on a single man, lifting his body in the air and hitting it to the ground.
The Miami Dade chapter of the NAACP, which shared the video on Instagram, last year appealed for the resignation of the Miami Beach police chief after several incidents of police brutality against Black Spring Breakers. (The Miami and Miami Beach Police Departments did not respond to requests for comment).
On social media, local event planners set up weeks of events to cater to tourists. The Instagram page @ SpringBreakMiami2021 shared a poster for a “Freaknik Pool Party” at a “Secret Mansion Location” that evening on Saturday morning. The afterparty, which was also hosted at an unknown club, has the theme ‘Hennything Goes’.
Another Instagram page invited guests to a white-dress pool party called ‘Cocaina’, promising mermaids, fire dancers, water pipe and another mansion. In the invitations, no masks, COVID-19 or social distance were mentioned. (No page responds to comment requests).
Some meeting pages were more covered in their announcements. The operator of an occasional magazine in another city in Florida told The Daily Beast they were advised not to talk about the website. “The company is on my ass,” the administrator wrote. ‘They do not even want me to post[s]. ”
The rise of Spring Breakers was aided by Florida government director Ron DeSantis, who in his speech to the state in early March said he welcomes visitors to Florida in hopes of stimulating the local economy. DeSantis has also made it more difficult for municipalities to enforce their own regulations by signing an executive order to cancel all fines for COVID-19 violations.
Vaccinations in the state have risen steadily since last week to about 14 percent of the population. But even after recent updates of their travel guidelines, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still advise unnecessary travel.
“We are very concerned that there will be a confluence of people here,” Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber told CNN last week, “and a real problem in its aftermath.”
On South Padre Island, on the southeast coast of Texas, a beach bar called Clayton’s shared a now-viral video of maskless contestants huddled in circles playing beer pong. The owner, Clayton Brashear, told local station KVEO-TV that he welcomed the crowd. “For Spring Break, we really decided at the last minute to go open, DJs, concerts, everything,” he said.
Brashear encouraged guests to wear masks, he said, but he does not enforce them. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who repeatedly tried to reopen the state during the pandemic, dropped the state’s mask mandate on March 10. Just days earlier, on March 2, the state had recorded a test positivity rate of more than 12 percent – three times the national average.
The bar also has a beach stage called Clayton’s Spring Break Beach Stage, which partnered with a Spring Break website to offer presentations on events that take place daily. (Neither Clayton nor the site responded to requests for comment).
“With Panama City all the way to the Gulf Shores drinking liquor on the beach in March and a spring break at the university, South Padre Island is booming,” reads the website, which charges $ 65 for a “Party Package Wristband” “.
Of Clayton’s, he adds: “There is no doubt that this is the # 1 largest spring break day party venue on South Padre Island.”