3 COVID cases confirmed, fair canceled

The Sanders County Board of Health voted to scrub this year's county fair at a special meeting Thursday evening at the fair pavilion.

Commissioners Tony Cox and Carol Brooker, along with retired Dr. Jack Lulack and retired Veterinarian Bob Gregg voted in favor of canceling the fair while Commissioner Glen Magera voted against shutting it down at that time. Magera wanted to go forward and see how the plans the fair board was working on progressed. The health board was concerned about the fair resulting in an outbreak of the coronavirus in Sanders County, where at that time there had been no reported cases. The fair was to take place Sept. 3-6.

This was the second meeting in two weeks that the two entities met at the pavilion to discuss plans to make the fair COVID-19 safe. Twenty-four people from Plains, Paradise, Thompson Falls, and Hot Springs attended the meeting - twice as many as the previous meeting - and a dozen wore protective safety masks. Members of the Board of Health and the Sanders County Fair Commission spoke prior to the vote, as did several members of the community, including Dr. Greg Hanson, president of Clark Fork Valley Hospital and Physician Assistant Nick Lawyer, who gave a special presentation with several COVID-19 statistics and the possible impact on Sanders County if the fair were to take place. Several members of the audience spoke in favor of canceling the fair; no one from the public at the meeting spoke up to have the fair take place this year, although numerous people took to Facebook and other Internet sites to voice their displeasure at the board's decision. But Cox said that had they not stopped the fair, there would have been as many people complaining that it was going to happen. 

Lawyer put together a 12-page Coronavirus Prediction Model as a hypothesis on the number of local Coronavirus cases would be generated if the fair were to take place under the present fair board plan, which he said would produce a big burden on the hospital. In his model, with 30,000 attendees, the total cases not admitted into the ICU, would be 484 cases, including a peak of 199 cases in early October.

"This is important to stress that this would be people sick enough to need hospitalization, but not sick enough to need critical care," said Lawyer, who added that an estimated 121 ICU level patients would need critical care and for each hospitalized case, there would be four cases in the community not severe enough to require hospitalization. "However, in the lowest-attendance model we would have a total of 197 admissions and 11 ICU admissions, well above our capacity," he said. In Lawyer's scenario, the hospital would be overwhelmed to handle the COVID-19 cases.

Several medical staff members of Clark Fork Valley Hospital reviewed the fair commission's plan and made written recommendations to the county's Board of Health and "strongly encouraged" the board not to approve the fair commission's plan. Hanson said the fair board had an impossible task, but he doesn't believe that the board's health plan could be compliant with the governor's stage 2 guidelines and the hospital can't risk its staff by participating in the fair. The fair board's plan of having only 50 people in a group doesn't allow for the governor's physical distancing guideline, according to Hanson.

"Our interpretation of this is that assembly of groups of 50 or more must be in a large enough space to allow for social distancing and that there was not enough room at the Sanders County Fair to allow for such distancing," said Lawyer. Hanson said Clark Fork Valley Hospital doesn't have the supplies to do  asymptomatic testing. "The current CDC guidelines are for testing for COVID for those individuals who show signs or symptoms of the disease or have one of several other specific indicators," said Barry Fowler, the hospital's director of Human and System Resources.

At this point, the boards could not determine whether or not the Monster Truck Rally gathering five days prior had any COVID-19 impact. Lawyer said it takes two to three days to become infectious and even then might not show signs or symptoms, and might not go to the hospital for another 10 days. Sanitarian Shawn Sorenson passed on the latest statistics of the virus in Montana, saying that as of that day there were 1,466 cases, including 96 in the last 24 hours, and 25 deaths. He believes there were more cases due to additional testing and that people are getting more careless.

Gregg is worried about the large number of people coming from outside Montana to the fair. "To me, the community is the thing I'm most worried about, more so than the economy," said Gregg, who was particularly concerned about enforcing social distancing. "We'll be bringing thousands of people into the city of Plains and I know it's a county fair, but it's really going to affect Plains the most," said Brooker. "It's going to be our school, it's going to be our grocery store, it's going to be our Town Pump," she said. Brooker said she recently received 15 emails from people asking about stopping the fair, including three Plains main street businesses, which would gain the most economically from having the fair, according to the commissioner. "In good conscience I couldn't see the county, who has been putting on all the restrictions, all of sudden think of having a fair, inviting thousands of people to our beautiful county, and feeling good about it. With all the planning in world we couldn't make this safe," said Brooker, who added that she was also concerned about the school, which is scheduled to begin a week prior to the fair.

"I've thought a lot about this. I love the fair, I love the rodeo. I love the economy it brings into Sanders County, but I can't really bring myself to do it. It's absolutely not the year to do it," said Brooker. "I'm a little skeptical on whether we can successfully do this without putting people at risk," said Cox, who commended the fair board for what they had done in coming up with a plan.

"This is an airborne disease. Click that into everything you said. The only way you're going to stop this from inflicting itself - all attendees can't breathe. That's it," said Lulack. "The reality of this pandemic is that one individual who is not responsible can put hundreds of innocent others at risk," said Hanson. "It is important to consider that the Sanders County Fair is scheduled to take place just as schools are starting their year, and our local children are drawn to this event," he added. 

The members of the fair board, however, believe they could have safely put on the fair. Board member Kim Bergstrom spent around 40 hours researching and writing the three-page Communicable Disease Plan. Chairman Randy Woods said they learned from the monster truck rally that they need to find a better way of making sure of social distancing. There were about 1,300 people at the event, but Woods said he saw only about six people wearing masks. He also noticed that some people ignored the tape placed in the no-seating spots. He said they could screw 2X4 boards on the seats that are supposed to be empty to deter people. "You can have the most wonderful plan in the world, but I don't know how you're going to enforce it," said Jill Lundstrom, the county nurse.

"It sounds like there's no support for the fair going forward. We were charged with the job as the fair board to bring the fair forward and we're in a weird environment," said Bergstrom. "We've put in a ton of time trying to make sure we can go forward. If we're going to get shut down, let's just do it and go about our way," said Bergstrom, whose health plan focused a lot on personal responsibility.

"I think we need to pull the plug now before it gets any further down the road," said Brooker. Magera, however, believed they still had time. His thoughts were, he said, to review the plan and the parts the health board didn't like and look at alternatives to fix it. "To pull the plug right now to me is a little bit quick," said Magera, who would like to see the two boards first work together. 

Woods believes the monster truck rally showed that people want to come out and have a good time and have a sense of normality. He said he was also worried about the lost revenue, even though he knew it wouldn't make a big profit this year. He was concerned that Powder River Rodeo, which sponsors the PRCA rodeo events at the fair, one of the fair moneymakers, would pull out of the 2021 fair, as would some of the derby drivers. Woods said they had 68 cars already registered, five times as many as last year. In addition, Melissa Cady, the fair manager, had 60 commercial vendors and 22 food and drink vendors signed up, not counting the Sanders County Concessions Group.

"We know that in Sanders County there were a lot of people that wanted the fair to go on," said Woods, who was disappointed in the Board of Health's decision to cancel the fair. "Their minds were made up. It didn't matter what we did," he added, referring to the health board.

In just over an hour, Gregg motioned his recommendation to cancel the 2020 fair, which was passed 4-1.