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No News Is Bad News Surprise yourself with the unpredictable Riverfront Times Written by
JEANNETTE COOPERMAN This is one in a series of essays from Riverfront Times readers in support of our recently launched Riverfront Times Press Club.
Playgrounds, gyms and large venues remain closed under St. Louis and St. Louis County orders, but other businesses can reopen May 18. | DOYLE MURPHY
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Rules of Reopening St. Louis and St. Louis County reveal new orders as they prepare to lift coronavirus restrictions Written by
DOYLE MURPHY
S
t. Louis city and county officials are edging toward lifting stay-at-home restrictions and “reopening” next week. There are still unanswered questions, but we’re getting more info about how that’s supposed to work. Starting last Friday, St. Louis County Executive Sam Page and St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson delivered some of the specifics still no big venues, playgrounds or gyms. But restaurant dining rooms and hair salons can reopen on May 18 if they follow new safety precautions. In the city, bars can start slinging drinks at that time. In the county, they can only open their interiors if they serve meals. “We’re going to crack the door open,” Krewson said during an interview Friday on St. Louis on the Air. “We are going to open it a little ways — 25 to 30 percent of the way open — so that we can ease into this.” The city and county have since late March been under stay-athome orders that effectively shut down or severely restricted businesses to “essential” services. As a
limited number of businesses are allowed to reopen, they’ll have to comply with new rules, such as requiring employees who interact with the public to wear face masks. The county will limit them to 25 percent capacity, and the city will mandate social distancing, including spacing dining-room tables six feet apart. Daycare centers, which have been closed except to watch the children of first responders, could also reopen if they follow safety guidelines, Krewson said during her radio interview. Neither the city nor the county have hit one of the early benchmarks experts and the White House had suggested for reopening fourteen consecutive days of decreasing cases. But Krewson and Page say they’ve been paying attention to the number of hospitalizations, given that COVID-19 testing continues to lag, making it a less-than-reliable measure. Dr. Alex Garza, who is leading the regional response as incident commander of the St. Louis Metropolitan Pandemic Task Force, said during a briefing last week his team has been tracking a seven-day rolling average in the data sets. The task force pays particularly close attention to hospitalizations as they try to assess transmission rates. The region was averaging about 39 new patients per day last week, “which again is pretty low.” “This is a trend,” Garza said. “We’re going to keep our eye on it, see how it changes going forward, but it’s another positive sign that we’re really headed in the right direction.” He attributes that to people generally following stay-at-home orders and taking other precautions.
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ost newspapers, you read already knowing what you will find. Not the RFT. It’s the difference between opening the sweater your grandma buys you every December and opening a surprise bought by a friend who gets your sense of humor, knows you’re smart and appreciates your delight in the unusual, the quirky, the deeply human. The RFT surprises us. It does not hold back, mince words, defer or suck up. And if ever we needed that kind of candor, it is now, when people know only what their friends know and nothing more, because the “other side” feels too far from our “truth” to even engage in discussion. In the decade I wrote for the paper, not once was I censored or told to take a different tack. Not once were the facts … softened, shall we say, or rearranged to be less confrontational. Even in their heyday, their Woodward and Bernstein glory days, newspapers were never as objective as they claimed to be. They have often protected their own sacred cows, be they publishers’ friends or major advertisers. At
Determining when it’s safe for businesses to reopen is trickier, though. A lot of it depends on those businesses making changes to minimize transmissions. He gave the example of grocery stores, which have put up spittle-blocking barriers along their checkout lines and created new cleaning procedures. Policing businesses has become easier said than done. House of ain gyms in hesterfield and Maryland Heights opened last week, despite the county’s prohibition, KMOV reported. And the City of St. Louis is facing a lawsuit filed on behalf of another gym and antique shop over its orders. hat has left elected officials to figure out how to respond if more businesses and their customers decide to go rogue.
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COURTESY JEANNETTE COOPERMAN the RFT, what I wrote lost us several accounts. My editor did not flinch; nor did the reps who lost commission. We knew what we were about, and it was more than money. (Note the paper’s current continuation, at huge personal cost to those putting it together.) A friend of mine stands about 180 degrees from me on most topics, and he is quick to characterize the RFT as a liberal rag — meaning it questions established authority and convention and looks out for those who have no other voice. Yet my friend reads the paper religiously. Why? Because it makes no pretense, and he always knows where he is. He values the honesty of a newspaper that is neither courting advertisers’ favor nor second-guessing the political winds. The beauty of this freewheeling alt-newsweekly has always been that you don’t have to agree with it to cherish it. You just have to let it surprise you. Jeannette Cooperman is an author, journalist, editor and former Riverfront Times staff writer.
“We’re already beginning to see more violations than we saw a week or two weeks ago,” Krewson said on St. Louis on the Air. “What we have to do is allow some easing of these restrictions and put others in place, like wear a mask.” But counting on people to take even basic precautions, such as wearing a mask, is less than dependable. Since the start of lockdown orders, even weak ones such as Missouri’s, there have been organized protests and “patriots,” often breaking along political lines, who’ve refused to comply. “For me, it’s not political at all,” Krewson said on the radio. “It’s just common sense. You don’t want to get sick, and you don’t want to get someone else sick, so just as sort of a good neighbor, a good person, you should wear a mask.” n
MAY 13-19, 2020
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