Less than a week after an “angry mob” swarmed a St. Louis County council meeting to oppose a new mask mandate, public health officials in Missouri announced on Saturday that at least one person has tested positive for the coronavirus and may have exposed others who attended the meeting.
The City of St. Louis Department of Health said it is trying to identify anyone who had close contact with the infected person and urged everyone who attended the council meeting to quarantine for nine days and look out for possible covid-19 symptoms.
“The DOH is continuing its contact tracing investigation into this case and encourages those who have not received a COVID-19 vaccine to get vaccinated,” Fredrick Echols, acting director of health for the City of St. Louis, said in a statement on Saturday. “It is the best tool we have to prevent severe COVID-19 complications, including death.”
Vaccine hesitancy has been an entrenched problem in Missouri, where about 57 percent of the eligible population older than 12 has received at least one dose of the vaccine, according to an analysis from The Washington Post. But recent spikes in hospitalizations led to a 49 percent increase in people seeking the vaccine.
The St. Louis area has seen a recent rise in coronavirus cases, driven primarily by the spread of the highly contagious delta variant. The variant now accounts for more than 90 percent of new covid cases in Missouri, KCUR reported. Across the state, more than 9,600 people have died and more than 681,500 people have tested positive since the start of the pandemic.
Because of the increasing number of hospitalizations and the spread of the delta variant, officials in St. Louis last Monday instituted a policy requiring that masks be worn inside public places and on public transit.
“We’ve lost more than 500 St. Louisans to COVID-19, and if our region doesn’t work together to protect one another, we could see spikes that overwhelm our hospital and public health systems,” Echols said last week when announcing the decision.
But the return to mask-wearing stoked the ire of many people who opposed the coronavirus restrictions at a county council meeting last week.
On Tuesday, a flock of maskless demonstrators aggressively advocated against the mask mandate. Many of the attendees sat shoulder-to-shoulder during the meeting. And as St. Louis County Department of Health’s acting director Faisal Khan spoke about the reasons for the new precautions, the crowd shouted degrading insults, including racist slurs, and mocked his accent.
“It was the saddest, most bizarre and disgusting thing that I’ve ever witnessed in my 30 years in public health,” Khan told The Post last week.
Khan also told The Post he feared that meeting could easily turn into a superspreader event.
When announcing that one of the meeting attendees had tested positive for covid, public health officials urged people to wear masks and practice social distancing when in public and to frequently wash their hands or use hand sanitizer.
“We are still in a pandemic caused by a virus that continues to spread rapidly in our communities, causing severe health complications including death,” Echols said in his statement. “It is very important that residents practice the health and safety mitigation measures.”