A video of a woman in a Nebraska supermarket without a mask and “appearing to deliberately cough” on other shoppers has gained national attention, and now her employer says they are investigating. The video went viral, with one copy garnering nearly 3 million views on Twitter in just 24 hours.
An internet sleuth apparently identified the woman, and her employer, a $27 billion multinational software company, SAP, is responding and appearing to validate that she does work for them. The Germany-based corporation says they are “taking the matter of an SAP employee incident very seriously.”
In the video the woman can be heard saying, “I don’t need to have [a mask] on, I’m not sick and neither are you.”
When confronted she claimed to have “allergies,” and also said “maybe” she has a medical condition that precludes her from wearing a mask. (No medical condition precludes her from covering her mouth and not coughing on others.)
In the video she almost appears to be laughing while coughing, saying, “Excuse me, I’m coming through,” and at one point calls the women confronting her “sheep.”
“According to the city of Lincoln, Nebraska, where the supermarket is located, everyone is required to wear face masks indoors – regardless of vaccination status,” KRON reports. “At this time, Lancaster County is considered ‘high risk of COVID-19 spread and impact in the community,’ according to a Sept. 3 update.”
On Tuesday MSNBC’s Joy Reid tweeted, “what are the laws around this? Isn’t this considered assault? Can you legally just go around coughing on people during a pandemic??”
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