Incumbent Gail Johnson, newcomer Desmon Duncan-Walker elected to city commission
Voter turnout fell to about 11%, the lowest in Gainesville city elections since 1997 March 17, 2021 | 7:15am EDT
Desmon Duncan-Walker, the District 1 Gainesville City Commissioner-elect, talks to reporters after her win at Cypress & Grove Brewing Co. on March 16, 2021. Photo by Julia Coin | The Independent Florida Alligator
Gainesville residents voted Tuesday to re-elect one city commissioner who saw them through a year of the COVID-19 pandemic, but voted out the other incumbent in favor of a local activist.
In the tight race that some East Gainesville residents followed closely, Desmon Duncan-Walker replaced incumbent Gigi Simmons, who was elected in 2
“I’m losing my mind,” she said. “Online classes are misery and everything sucks.”
Thursday statistics from UNH’s testing and tracing lab shows the school has 506 active coronavirus cases among students and staff, spiking by nearly 240 cases since the school initiated numerous restrictions to mitigate the spread of the virus last Thursday.
Of the active cases, 498 are tied to members of the student body, with another 637 students needing to quarantine as a result of exposure and contact tracing. Tests from the last week show 1.34% positivity rate among the 22,424 COVID-19 tests processed by UNH’s lab.
Last Thursday, President James W. Dean Jr. released a video message to the university community following the school’s “dramatic rise” in COVID-19 cases less than two weeks into the semester. The increase led UNH to move a notch back in its operations scale to “orange mode,” one which moved all courses online and began limiting students’ social gatherings.