Police arrested a woman in Kentucky earlier this week for shopping at a grocery store in defiance of a court order to stay home because she had the coronavirus.
Kendra A. Burnett, 37, tested positive for the coronavirus and was ordered by a judge to quarantine herself but visited a Kroger grocery store anyway and was arrested by police, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer.
The Lousiville Health Department ordered Burnett, a former employee at a senior living home that housed several people infected with the virus, to quarantine herself at home after she failed to sign an agreement to quarantine herself on April 3.
“According to CDC protocols, close contact with a COVID-19 infected person is defined as being within 6 feet of an infected individual for fifteen minutes or longer,” Dave Langdon, spokesman for Louisville Metro Public Health and Wellness said in an email. “Based on these protocols, it is unlikely that customers who were in the store at the time are at risk due to this exposure.”
Langdon added that the state is “issuing an advisory to the Kroger store alert its employees to the date and time that an infected individual was in the store and to the symptoms of COVID-19.”
Burnett is being charged with wanton endangerment in the first degree, contempt of a court libel/slander resistance to order, and criminal mischief in the second degree.
