ST. LOUIS (KMOX) - As COVID-19 cases rise in St. Louis County, the top official feels "vaccine hostility" is growing at about the same rate.
"This is not a Chicken Little situation, folks," St. Louis County Executive Sam Page said in his Wednesday morning media address. "The circumstances are dire, and we cannot let complacency or misinformation be barriers to the preventable."
And those circumstances are the 191 COVID-19 cases that the county is averaging daily this week. That's a far cry from the roughly 21 cases the county was dealing with earlier in the month. St. Louis County has reported five deaths due to COVID-19 in the last week.
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St. Louis County's positivity rate is also at 9%, meaning it's in the CDC's "red zone" for community transmission.
One thing Page did not have to say was whether there were new mandates coming soon. But he did urge residents to wear a mask in public, much like the St. Louis Pandemic Task Force did. In the last week, the County has reported five total deaths caused by COVID-19.
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"If you don't know the vaccine status of everyone around you, you should wear a mask. It's really impractical or impossible to know the vaccine status of everyone in a crowded place, whether you're indoors or outdoors."
Page says there will continue to be a lot of sickness, a lot of hospitalizations, and a lot of loss of life until the Delta variant or the next variant is stopped, and made a plea to the community to mask up and get vaccinated.
You can watch Page's press conference here:
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