Rules of Reopening

St. Louis and St. Louis County reveal new orders as they prepare to lift coronavirus restrictions

Written by DOYLE MURPHY

St. 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-at-home 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.

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 Pain gyms in Chesterfield 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.

That has left elected officials to figure out how to respond if more businesses and their customers decide to go rogue.

“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.”