GREENVILLE, IL (KMOX) - As St. Clair County sees its COVID-19 positivity rate get closer to acceptable levels, it's looking to get help from their rural neighbors to get the region's rate down to where strict mitigation efforts can be lifted.
One county they're looking at is Bond, where the seven-day rate has been hovering around ten percent. That county's health administrator, Sean Eifort, says unlike St. Clair County, he's had a hard time getting all the agencies on board to enforce anti-covid regulations.
"When you've got several different people at the table," Eifort says,
"sometimes it takes a bit to get to a point where we are all in agreement about how we need to go about enforcement."
Eifort says some of that local disagreement on COVID-19 policy is political, as some people in the news and social media imply that what we're seeing isn't real.
"There are questions about the actual enforceability of some of the mitigations so, I think people are hesitant to do what they think is maybe going too far."
That dovetails with a recent poll from the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, which found the public's trust in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S.'s top doctors, especially Anthony Fauci, is rapidly dropping, particularly among Republicans.
"Nearly half of adults hold at least one misconception about coronavirus prevention and treatment, including one in five who say wearing a face mask is harmful to your health and one in four who say hydroxychloroquine is an effective treatment for coronavirus," the Kaiser Foundation study found.
Locally, Eifort says the state health department will be conducting free testing at the fairgrounds for a second straight day Thursday. He hopes that brings the county's positivity rate down.
The metro east region must see three days of 6.5 percent positivity rates to have the strict mitigation efforts lifted. As of September 27, the last posting of the 7-Day Rolling, the region's positivity rate was 7.4 percent. The rate in Clinton County was 12.8 percent. Madison County's was 7.5 percent. Monroe County's was 8.6 percent. Randolph County reported 2.5 percent. St. Clair County was 6.5, Washington County's was 11.3.
