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The Great Influencer Exodus
Prominent Instagram influencers are getting dragged for fleeing New York, showing their millions of followers what not to do during a pandemic
This weekend, Naomi Davis, an influencer with nearly half a million Instagram followers, announced that she and her family were leaving their Upper West Side apartment, getting into an RV, and traveling west. She said they were escaping locked-down New York for the sake of her family’s mental health and to find outdoor space for her children. Davis stressed they chose an RV so they could avoid hotels and people. After weeks of officials asking New Yorkers to self-quarantine and just hours before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended a 14-day statewide quarantine, her family left the city.
The reasons we all need to just stay home are well documented by now. Asymptomatic carriers can spread the virus. Patient 31 in South Korea proved that it takes just one carrier to infect thousands with the novel coronavirus. People traveling from New York aren’t just putting others at risk—they are also endangering themselves. Even RVs with full refrigerators need to stop at gas stations and therefore risk picking up the virus along their journey. The virus isn’t the only danger; there are stories about people with New York license plates being threatened with violence when they descend upon already exhausted towns.
Davis is not the only influencer escaping from New York. Ali Maffucci of Inspiralized, a site dedicated to spiralizing vegetables, told her roughly 202,000 followers that she too was leaving the New York metro area with her family. In her post, Maffucci said, “All we can do is what we’re doing 👉🏼 what’s best for our family ❤️.” Arielle Charnas, a fashion influencer with more than 1.3 million Instagram followers, left for a rental home in the Hamptons on March 26, eight days after testing positive for Covid-19. She told followers she would donate her antibody-rich plasma once she’d been symptom-free for 14 days, a milestone she hadn’t hit before leaving for Long Island.
Imagine if just 1% of Davis’ followers see her Instagram post and decide to “think bigger picture” and stop…
