Faced with ‘alarming trend’ in COVID-19 cases, Pinellas County expects to issue new rule on masks

The Pinellas County Board of County Commissioners next week is expected to consider requiring face coverings be worn inside some businesses and limiting how many people can be inside restaurants and bars.

Commissioners, meeting online, agreed the county needed to act to control the spread of COVID-19 after hearing public health officials describe what they said were concerning trends.

Over the last seven days, the county has averaged 136 new cases a day, with a 5.6 percent positive rate among those who get a test, said Dr. Ulyee Choe, director of the Florida Department of Health-Pinellas County. There’s also been an increase in visits to emergency rooms from people with symptoms and a slight decline in intensive care unit availability — metrics that are closely watched to ensure hospitals can treat patients. Choe called those numbers “alarming.”

The exponential growth in positive cases has consequences, Dr. Larry Fineman, chief medical officer for HCA West Florida, told commissioners.

“In Pinellas, between one in five and one in six patients who develop COVID-19 are hospitalized and in Pinellas between one in four and one in five of those patients who are hospitalized go on to die,” Fineman said. “Right now the mortality rate of people who develop COVID-19 and test positive is 3.7 percent. You have a three times greater chance of dying from COVID-19 than you do from open heart surgery. To me that’s terrifying.”

Fineman urged commissioners to mandate masks, which he said are effective at stopping the spread of COVID-19. He said he oversees 15 COVID units in HCA West Florida, four in Pinellas County, and he’s more comfortable walking into the COVID units where everyone is wearing masks than he is walking into the grocery store.

“I am terrified when I walk in there because the only people who have a mask on are me and the cashier and about two-thirds of the people don’t,” Fineman said.

The goal from the start has been to protect health care system capacity and to safely reopen businesses and avoid another shutdown, said Commissioner Ken Welch. The county has tried strong recommendations and messaging, but knew weeks ago that people were not social distancing, he said. Now, the county is seeing the outcome of that.

“We see the storm that’s coming and that’s not even counting the fact that Phase 2 of the reopening was June 5, so we haven’t seen that impact of that or the impact of the protests and folks who were not social distancing. We’ve got a problem and we’ve got limited tools to deal with it,” Welch said.

The debate came on the heels of St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Kriseman’s announcement that employees of all St. Pete businesses would be required to wear masks while in areas of the business open to the public, effective at 5 p.m. Friday. County commissioners spent a good part of their two-hour plus discussion on Thursday morning talking about masks.

Commissioner Kathleen Peters raised questions about the effectiveness of masks, while Commissioner Janet Long said masks protect those around an individual more than the person wearing the mask. Masks are one tool, but not the only tool to deal with COVID-19 said Dr. Angus Jameson, director of Pinellas County Emergency Medical Services.

“The primary method of preventing a respiratory transmitted virus is by not breathing air with viruses in it, and the primary method of doing that is not being near people who are breathing out viruses in the air,” Jameson said. “That being said if you have to be in that environment where you can’t avoid that air, clearly a mask can help you.”

One major problem has been crowded bars, with people packed shoulder-to-shoulder, despite measures limiting capacity to 50 percent, said Barry Burton, county administrator, and Sheriff Bob Gualtieri.

“Business owners are the ones that need to be responsible for this,” Gualtieri said.”They should need and want to be open. We want them to flourish and prosper, but the problem is there’s a whole bunch of them that are not gate-keeping themselves.”

If there are big gatherings this weekend, Gualtieri said his office will not do anything because he’s “not willing to get in fights about it,” but he said he would enforce proposed new rules that would limit capacity in bars.

Commissioners offered several other ideas, including more stringent capacity limits in restaurants, which currently are allowed to operate at 75 percent of capacity, and mandatory masks for everyone inside a retail establishment, as well as civil fines for businesses that violate the rules.

There are no changes to the existing rules at this time. Burton said he and other county officials would draft a proposed emergency county ordinance based on the commissioners’ input, for their consideration at the Tuesday, June 23 meeting.

That meeting  was supposed to be the first in-person gathering for the Pinellas County Board of County Commissioners since April. But commissioners decided to continue meeting online instead, and postponed public hearings scheduled for June 23 to a later date.

Commissioners also extended the local state of emergency from June 19 to June 26.