"Devastated by the death of my longtime staffer Gary Tibbetts who passed away today at Manatee Memorial Hospital from COVID-19", Buchanan said via Twitter on Friday. "Gary was the consummate professional and a true public servant in every sense of the word".
— Rep. Vern Buchanan (@VernBuchanan) July 24, 2020
On 15 July, Buchanan announced that Tibbetts had been hospitalized. Tibbetts had worked for the congressman for nine years and had formerly served as a police officer in Manchester, New Hampshire.
The state of Florida, where Buchanan and Tibbetts lived, now has almost 400,000 novel coronavirus cases and more than 5,500 virus-related deaths, according to data compiled by the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
As of 24 July, the US has registered nearly 4,025,000 novel coronavirus cases and almost 144,000 fatalities related to the disease, with more than 72,000 cases and 1,113 deaths recorded over the past 24 hours, the Centres says.
