Patterson: Social distancing is working
ANTHONY BROWN/THE FORUM
Tom Patterson Administrator of the Nodaway County Health Center
MARYVILLE, Mo. — County health department director Tom Patterson said during his weekly briefing with the county commission Tuesday that social distancing practices are making a difference, and could see them continuing for quite a while.
“The mitigation strategies that we’ve been using — social distancing and staying at home, good hygiene, those things — are working,” Patterson told the commission Tuesday morning. “You can see the effect in the numbers. What’s around the corner? Well, I anticipate that we’re going to have to continue those strategies for a while — a long while.”
Patterson said that when cases do begin to peak in Missouri, which he said could happen around the end of the month, it will be key to not abandon the social distancing protocols too quickly.
“One thing we don’t want to do is just stop,” he said. “We walked up this thing, now we’ve got to walk down the other side of it; We cannot just jump off the side of it. If we jump off, we’re going to see numbers go back up. So I think we’ll be in a cycle of some degree of social distancing for a while now until we get some vaccines that can really help knock this down.”
In the meantime, Patterson said the health department supports the CDC’s recommendation to wear cloth masks when around other people, especially in grocery stores or other areas where six feet of distance is not always possible. The CDC’s recommendation, issued last week, calls for the use of basic cloth masks, not surgical masks or other equipment that is in short supply for health care workers across the country.
The agency even provides step-by-step instructions on its website on how to make masks out of household items like coffee filters, T-shirts and bandanas. The use of the masks is intended to help stop the spread of COVID-19 especially by people who are asymptomatic.
“Locally, I would say, right now, if you have other issues, then you might want to consider masking up when you go around people,” Patterson said. “If you have pre-existing conditions, or if you have breathing issues, respiratory issues. … Any kind of barrier helps.”
But, Patterson warned, masks aren’t a substitute for social distancing practices, they’re just another tool to help those practices be more effective.
Since two positive tests were returned last week, Patterson said there has been a slight uptick in testing in the county, sending in what he estimated to be around 4-6 tests per day, all of which still have to meet the strict standards for testing from the state.
Close contacts of those who have tested positive have been contacted, he said, and many others have come forward and been worried that they may have been exposed. But Patterson said it’s important to remember that a close contact is only someone who was within six feet for about 10 minutes or more the person who tested positive.
“It’s not, you know them or you rode to work with somebody in their household, or you walked though the building and they worked in the building,” he said. “None of that makes you a contact.”
Following the procedures that the health department had outlined beforehand, Patterson said that last week, his office asked each person who tested positive for people who fit that close contact definition going back to two days before they started feeling any symptoms. Anyone on that list was contacted, and if they had symptoms that warranted testing, then they were tested.
No more positive tests have been returned so far, but Patterson said he expects more as time goes on.
But one benefit, he said, is that if everyone continues to follow social distancing protocols, the list of close contacts for any person who tests positive should be short.
