Following a period of several weeks in which daily new cases declined in St. Joseph County, the COVID-19 infection rate climbed again this week with over 30 new cases. Health Officer Rebecca Burns of the Branch-Hillsdale-St. Joseph Community Health Agency (BHSJ) said the spike was due primarily to an outbreak at an employer, and to several cases at schools around the county.
St. Joseph is one of several Michigan counties that have begun seeing a renewed increase in new cases in the past two weeks. Burns said the school cases increase is “not any more significant than we would expect from having brought people together.”
The Michigan Supreme Court’s recent ruling that nullified Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s many Executive Orders on pandemic safety was followed by a “significant amount of misinformation.” The court ruled that the structure of the Governor’s orders were unconstitutional, but not their substance. Consequently, Burns said, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), using the Michigan Public Health Code, issued orders of its own to replace as many of the governor’s orders as possible on the Monday and Tuesday following the court’s ruling.
“We still need to wear masks, we still need to be socially distance, and we still need to limit our gathering sizes,” Burns said. The new HHS orders “are certainly a little bit different than the executive orders were. But, largely, most of most of the requirements are still in place,” she said. “We’re really asking people to put politics aside, and let’s just, you know, let’s remember, we are in a pandemic, and we do need to continue the mitigation strategies that we know work to prevent this disease.”
Regarding the potential for disease transmission, Burns said, “some people do get very light cases, and they do just fine, and then the next person that gets it can have a very significant illness.” Asymptomatic people, she said, are the most common transmitters of the virus. People who do show symptoms can also transmit the virus for roughly two days before showing symptoms, even if they are not aware they have it at the time.
Burns also said masking remains important to protecting others, because although it does not completely stop a person from inhaling virus particles in the air around them, it does catch virus particles as they are exhaled. “Me wearing a mask protects others around me. And others wearing a mask help to protect me. If I wear a mask, but others around me do not, I am not protected from them. So, it’s important that everybody wear a mask with this particular virus.”
In addition to the rising case count, Burns said the county’s total death count from the pandemic, which stood at 11 since the late summer, climbed to 12 last week. At the same time, there were also three new deaths in adjacent Branch County. For St. Joseph County, the total case count since the pandemic began is 829, meaning that roughly one out of every 74 people has contracted the disease so far.
Dave Vago is a writer and columnist for Watershed Voice. A Philadelphia native with roots in Three Rivers, Vago is a planning consultant to history and community development organizations and is the former Executive Director of the Three Rivers DDA/Main Street program.
