MOUNT VERNON — With 12 more positive COVID-19 cases added Thursday, Knox County now stands at 110 cases, Knox Public Health Commissioner Julie Miller said during her Facebook Live press conference Thursday.
On Thursday, the state also released its updated Ohio Public Health Advisory System map. Knox County has risen in community spread risk from a Level 1 county, coded yellow, to a Level 2 county, coded orange. It means going from “active exposure and spread” to “increased exposure and spread,” advising “exercise high degree of caution.” Knox County had been in yellow since the map’s release a few weeks ago, with Ashland and Morrow counties now the lone ones bordering Knox to receive the yellow designation.
“I believe it’s going to get worse before it gets better here,” Miller said, adding that Gov. Mike DeWine’s mandatory mask order set in place Wednesday will help. But she also stated that while not wearing a mask in public settings could be charged as a second-degree misdemeanor, her staff does not have the resources to enforce it.
Miller said going from Level 1 to Level 2 was definitely a factor in her decision, backed by other county officials including Knox County Commissioners, County Prosecutor Chip McConville, and Sheriff Dave Shaffer, to cancel senior fair events at the upcoming Knox County Fair. Included in this decision was canceling all grandstand events except harness racing.
There were just too many issues to overcome and all involved the serious potential for COVID-19 spread, Miller offered, including the prospect of having anywhere from 4,000 to 6,000 people in and around the grandstand on a nightly basis. There would be no way to enforce the mask requirement, she emphasized, and also, the social distancing of 6 feet between individuals would have been problematic. The Junior Fair and its animal judging events leading up to market sale day is still scheduled to happen, and will start Sunday morning with the Market Beef Show.
Knox County now meets two of the first three indicators out of seven, which are part of the state’s Public Health Advisory System “Summary of Alert Indicators.” Indicator 1 involves being “flagged” if a county exceeds 50 cases per 100,000 residents over the last two weeks. One Ohio health map related to COVID-19 put Knox County at 94 cases per 100,000, which is still low compared to larger, neighboring counties such as Richland and Licking.
Knox County also meets Indicator 3, which is being flagged when a county’s proportion of cases that are not in a congregate setting goes over 50 percent in at least one of the past three weeks. Congregate settings include long-term care facilities like nursing homes and developmental centers. This means more than half of local cases involve individual new cases coming about as a result of community spread — with youth sports such as softball, social gatherings on private property, weddings, funerals and religious services all being places where the virus has spread recently, according to Miller.
The county’s newest cases include a softball player and a football player, and Miller said a difficult decision had to be made to shut a team down and send them into quarantine for two weeks.
But that doesn’t mean there haven’t been congregant-related increases in cases as well. This week, KPH reported an outbreak among patients and staff at Country Court Skilled Nursing Center in Mount Vernon. As of Thursday, 19 Country Court patients and 4 staff had tested positive for COVID-19. Those who tested positive are in isolation, with those who had been in close contact with them being monitored for symptoms. Those who are most at risk to bring the virus into a long-term care facility are its employees, she noted.
Miller said the dire pace of a mid-summer surge in cases has left her fatigued at times. It has been a very hard sell to get people to join in on the major health crisis of our times, which can see its curve flattened but only if citizens do their part with masks, social distancing, personal hygiene and following guidelines such as no mass gatherings. But some people have decided to throw caution to the wind.
“If I had my way, I would shut us down for two weeks to knock out this virus,” Miller said.
As it stands, if Knox County goes into Level 3, or red, as so many other counties have done, then Miller said she would — however reluctantly — exercise her authority to shut some things down. And that would likely involve closing some of the places that reopened in May although she did not provide specifics.
“We do not want to go to red,” she said.
Miller, a registered nurse, said at one time in her career she worked for Riverside Methodist Hospital in Columbus. Her job in surgical trauma required her to wear a mask. The masks offered protection to nurses and the patients as well.
“They could not afford to have all the nurses get sick (at once),” she said. “Masks work.” She added that wearing a mask cuts down her chance of getting COVID-19 by about 65 percent.
Good news for Knox County is that to move up to Level 3, red, there would have to be a marked, sustained increase in hospital admissions and Emergency Department cases, which has not yet happened, she said.
To date, more than 2,300 Knox County residents have been tested. Although Miller said she has not yet determined a “positivity rate,” it is a simple equation dividing the number who have tested positive by the total number tested. That would give Knox County a positivity rate of close to 5 percent — well under what some large cites have suffered, where positivity rates have been well above 20 percent. The state of Ohio is currently warning Ohioans who have traveled to states with higher than a 15 percent average positivity rate to remain in self-quarantine upon their return home.
