Cape Girardeau County’s face-mask mandate will remain in place, at least for now.

Members of the Cape Girardeau County Public Health Center’s Board of Trustees voted unanimously Tuesday to maintain the mandate until its next meeting, scheduled for Sept. 22. However, the mask order could be reconsidered before then, depending on COVID-19 case trends in the coming weeks.

The order has been in place since July 13 when the number of active cases in Cape Girardeau County exceeded 200. By Aug. 5, about three weeks after the mask order began, the county’s active case count had dropped to 69.

Since then, the number of active cases in Cape Girardeau County has gradually risen. On Tuesday, the county had 163 active cases.

Tuesday’s vote took place during the health board’s regular monthly meeting at the Osage Centre, which was attended by about three dozen socially-distanced, mostly masked county residents, and followed nearly an hour of public comments.

Most of the comments were from those who wanted the board to rescind the order. Several said the masks were ineffective and a hazard to public health, while others said they opposed the order because they said it restricted their personal freedom.

Cape Girardeau County Public Health Center board member John Freeze asks a speaker to provide a source for information cited regarding COVID-19 fatality rates Tuesday during a Board of Trustees meeting at the Osage Centre in Cape Girardeau.BEN MATTHEWS

Angry voices

Some of the public statements were punctuated with raised voices and pointed fingers as several people accused the board of “perpetuating hysteria.”

“This mandate is not in the best interest of our citizens,” Mark Gihring told the board.

Gihring, who had previously addressed members of the Cape Girardeau County Commission in opposition to the mask mandate, is a science teacher, school bus driver and small-farm owner in northern Cape Girardeau County.

The mask order, Gihring said, is detrimental to businesses and causes “psychological and emotional damage” to people.

“I’m a bus driver. When a first-grader or kindergartner gets on the bus and wants me to give them a hug, what am I supposed to do? Smile through my mask, brush them aside, send them to their seat wondering why they’ve been rejected? That’s absurd,” he said.

“Masking the public dehumanizes us,” Gihring continued. “The mental pictures that come to mind when I think of a masked society are those of Communist Russia or North Korea — no feeling, no empathy, just existence, and that’s not how I want to live.”

Gihring compared masks to “a seed of restricting personal freedom” that “must be destroyed before it grows into a deeply-rooted tree of totalitarian oppression.”

Among others who spoke in opposition to the mask order was Rita LaVanchy, who emphasized the benefits of a healthy lifestyle as a means to build immunity to coronavirus.

“We need to promote health rather than a forced mandate that hinders health and immunity,” said LaVanchy, who has spoken in opposition to face masks at several recent meetings of the County Commission and the July 28 meeting of the health board.

“Doctors are not on board with this,” she said, adding that her own physician has described the mask requirement as “stupid.”

“Our bodies thrive when we give them fresh air to breathe,” LaVanchy said, and pointed to her own mask. “If you think this mask is keeping you from getting COVID, you are sadly mistaken.”

Board member Georganne Syler, a retired dietetic professor at Southeast Missouri State University, told LaVanchy she agreed a healthy lifestyle can help a person build resistance to coronavirus.

“I couldn’t agree more,” she said. “I spent my life trying to get people to do all the healthy things — fresh air, sunlight, exercise, good nutrition. But in America, we have over three-fourths of our population that’s obese or overweight (and) changing your behavior today will not give you a greater immune system tomorrow.”

An attendee broadcasts a Facebook Live video as Rita LaVanchy criticizes the Cape Girardeau Public Health Center's mask mandate during a Board of Trustees meeting Tuesday at the Osage Centre in Cape Girardeau.BEN MATTHEWS

Mask support

While most of comments were from those opposed to face masks, a few people expressed their appreciation for the health department and said the masks have been beneficial. Among them was Matt Lacy, associate superintendent of the Jackson School District.

“Yesterday (Monday) we had over 5,000 kids return to school, so whether you agree with masking or disagree, can we agree that’s a win?” he asked. “We need some normality in our lives right now.”

Lacy credited masks with preventing many of the district’s instructors from possible coronavirus infections when a staff member who attended a new teacher breakfast tested positive for the virus.

“Because everybody was masked, we didn’t lose the whole staff,” he said.

Dr. John Russell, medical director for the Cape Girardeau County Public Health Center and adviser to the health department board, talked to the Southeast Missourian after the meeting.

“The numbers for Cape County continue to be stable and significantly better than surrounding counties and the state as a whole,” he said, and credited face masks, social distancing, personal hygiene and other measures for helping the county manage the virus as well as it has.

“In Cape Girardeau County, we are lucky because our case fatality rate is about 0.7% and for the state it’s about 1.8%, so we are under half, and that’s a credit to both our medical community and expertise as well as the fact that we are staying under the averages for the number of people in the population that are actually catching the virus.”

Coronavirus, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is now the third-leading cause of death in the United States, trailing only heart disease and cancer.

“We have more people dying of coronavirus in the United States than from drunk driving or gun violence, so it continues to be a significant public health threat,” Russell said.

Asked how much difference the county’s face mask mandate is making, Russell replied, “Only retrospectively can we prove that it did good or bad.”

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