Health board backs away from additional restrictions

The local business community won’t face a second round of restrictions on operating hours and capacity the Flathead City-County Board of Health determined last Thursday in a 5-3 vote following nearly three hours of public comment and discussion.

The board decided against instituting a Health Officer Order that would have limited social gatherings to 25 people, regardless of the ability to social distance, required event organizers to submit plans for approval and banned gatherings of 500 or more entirely. The order was proposed by the Flathead City-County Health Department as a means of reducing the spread of COVID-19, which has climbed at alarming rates in recent weeks. Flathead County now has the second-highest number of cases of any county in the state with 1,308 active cases as of Tuesday.

A measure to reduce capacity of restaurants, bars and churches to 25% was initially included in the proposal, but was dropped prior to the board’s discussion. By removing that part of the proposal from the agenda, no board discussion was held on those proposed restrictions.

Health Board members Annie Bukacek, Bill Burg, Pamela Holmquist, Ardis Larsen and Ronalee Skees voted to take no action on the remaining portion of the Health Department’s proposal regarding crowd sizes, while board members Peter Heyboer, Roger Noble and Kyle Waterman did not favor that course of action.

The decision comes on the same day Flathead County saw 79 more new cases reported with more than 1,200 of its 2,286 total cases labeled as active. Hospitals in the county also currently report 29 patients hospitalized with the virus.

Bob Young, a partner in Echo Lake Cafe, said he recognized that his restaurant has an obligation to keep members of the public as safe as possible, but was concerned about potentially having to limit operations again.

“I don’t want to shut down again and I can't operate at 25%,” Young told the Eagle. “I’d have to lay off a lot of people. We’d have a skeleton crew and it would be bad for the local economy.”

Flathead Lake Brewing Company general manager Nicole Harker said her establishment put a plan in place upon learning of the potential new restrictions.

“Our restaurants are already set up for success. It would just be decreasing our capacity from 75 to 25%,” she said. “It’ s hard facing the fact that we would potentially need to decrease business anymore. It’s been a hard year -- But the health of the community needs to come first.”

But with Thursday’s decision, Bigfork’s restaurants, churches and bars will continue operating as they have been for the last few months. In the meantime, COVID-19 cases across the valley continue to climb.

“Our office is drowning in COVID cases right now,” interim County Health Officer Tamalee St. James Robinson told the board after the decision. “We have 29 temporary staff and 11 regular staff and we are losing people every day that have been at the health department for years. This is a really, really hard job dealing with something that hasn’t just been going on for a week or month. We have been dealing with this for six months.”

She went on to say that she would like to see her department be able to complete contact tracing on new cases within 24 hours, but staff shortages and 80 to 100 new cases each day has led to the task taking two to three days, leading to an increase of the spread of the virus throughout the community.

“We will do the best we can, but this is an impossible job. It’s incredibly hard on our employees and we have been put in an impossible position,” Robinson said.

The decision to not pursue the proposed health order came after several board members voiced concerns about the transparency of their decisions and a need to be able to justify the numbers used as the cutoff limit for gatherings, while board member Annie Bukacek voiced her opinion that COVID-19 is not as serious a threat as people may believe.

Bukacek, who attributes the rising number of cases to a rise in testing numbers, argued that the mortality numbers do not back up the need for increased restrictions.

“If you look at the death rate in Montana based on the government CDC (Centers for Disease Control) data, it’s a 0.2 percent death rate. That is two per 10,000 cases, and that’s if you believe the CDC’s data, which not all of us do. Statistically, for practical purposes, COVID in Montana has 100 percent survival rate,” she said. “I’m not saying that the people who die don’t matter, but in terms of an imminent threat, I’ve never seen anything with such a low death rate.”

IN HIS report to the board, Kalispell Regional Healthcare CEO Craig Lambrecht reported that the hospitalization rate for COVID cases in Flathead County is around 7%, with a mortality rate of between 0.5 and 1%, but his biggest worry right now is keeping the area hospitals staffed.

“Caring for COVID patients is very labor-intensive, so our biggest issue right now is the stress on our staff. We do have adequate beds right now, the issue is staffing for the beds,” he said. “We’re busy, it’s crazy and the stress on our staff is real. We are just going to plan on this continuing for the long haul.”

While the board made the decision to take no action on the current proposed health order, that does not mean that a similar order will not come before the board again soon. Several members voiced concern that action should be taken sooner rather than later.

“I am concerned that we are passing this just to take action down the road. I would encourage us to come back together within short order with an updated proposal with all of our concerns addressed so we can submit it for another vote. I don’t think we can wait until next month, given the growth of activity in our valley,” said Peter Heyboer, who voted against the motion to dismiss the proposed order.

“I do hope that we will come together again soon to take action. We are being asked to take action and we are in a moment of crisis,” board member Kyle Waterman added.

The board is not scheduled to meet again until mid-November.