People are stressed by the pandemic, and emotions are running high, said County Executive Sam Page during his regular press conference on Friday, April 24.
“One thing we should all be encouraged about is that everyone in St. Louis County is respecting social distancing guidelines,” Page said. “By staying home, you’ve helped flatten the curve and save lives. But we can’t let up.”
Mayor Lyda Krewson made similar comments in her regular “Live With Lyda” Facebook livestream. Both fielded questions about why St. Louis County and city will not be relaxing restrictions on May 4, as the governor plans on doing for the rest of the state.
Krewson explained that the state has 114 counties. Some other counties only have one COVID-19 case and are much less densely populated.
“We have 4,000 cases,” Krewson said. “We are not all alike. We can’t all do exactly the same thing.”
If a business is in the City of St. Louis, St. Louis County or St. Charles, they must follow their local leaders’ guidelines and not the governor’s, Krewson said. These three counties have said that they will re-evaluate their stay-at-home orders in mid-May.
“The governor has made this very clear, that it’s up to the local jurisdictions,” she said.
As of today, the city had 972 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 46 confirmed deaths. St. Louis County had 2,653 cases and 117 deaths, and St. Charles had 516 cases and 26 deaths.
“The long and the short of it, there are 4,000 cases just here in this three county area,” Krewson said. “And that compares to 6,321 in the state. We have two thirds of the cases.”
Krewson and Page are basing their decisions on lifting restrictions on the data analysis and recommendations from the St. Louis Metropolitan Pandemic Task Force. The task force includes four major health care systems: BJC HealthCare, Mercy, SSM Health and St Luke’s Hospital. These systems represent 2.8 million people for an area that encompasses surrounding counties in Missouri and Illinois in the larger St. Louis region. The number of hospitalizations in this area are still on the rise, according to the task force.
Dr. Alex Garza, the task force incident commander, has repeatedly said that the region needs to see a sustained decline in the number of hospitalizations and infections before we can consider relaxing the region’s stay-at-home orders.
“We have said that the peak is going to be coming this weekend,” said Garza, chief medical officer of SSM Health, during his daily briefing on April 24. “We are still not on the downward side of the slope.”
The region will not get back to normal for a long time, until we have a vaccine, he said. However, in the next few weeks there will be guidelines on how to reopen businesses and part of the community, Garza said. That could mean limiting the number of people in restaurants and wearing masks. As Page said, that could mean making trails in parks only one way. The county parks director is drafting a plan to be able to establish some of these guidelines, and he hopes to be able to share something next week, Page said. While the economic toll has been great, it has not been as harsh as other regions who did not act as quickly as the St. Louis region did, Page said.
On the plus said, the task force reported on Friday that more than 1,000 people have been discharged from the hospital.
“It’s a direct reflection of the outstanding work and heroic commitment of thousands of healthcare workers in the region,” Garza said. “And it’s also a result of our collective efforts, of essential workers who have kept our community moving, small business owners who have sacrificed a great deal and elected officials who had to make some tough decisions.”
