McHenry County Board to consider giving health department more teeth with COVID-19 enforcement

McHenry County Board Chairman Jack Franks has asked the McHenry County Department of Health to figure out what it would need to enforce COVID-19 mitigation measures more effectively and draft a resolution to be considered at Tuesday's county board meeting.

As a resurgence of the virus continues to accelerate in McHenry County and across the state, Public Health Administrator Melissa Adamson told board members the health department is struggling with enforcing the new mitigation measures placed on the county by the Illinois Department of Public Health.

"I would like to know what you would suggest so you would have more teeth in order to enforce these things if the other entities are not willing to do so," Franks said at Thursday's committee of the whole meeting. "And, heck, we can get one done by Tuesday. If we have it drafted today, we could put it on (the board's agenda) tomorrow."

In August, the Illinois General Assembly approved three-tiered enforcement guidelines to help local health departments and other entities enforce the state's business safety protocols on face masks and social distancing. But with the state's Tier 1 mitigation measures, which include a ban on indoor dining, the legal guidance is not quite as clear, Adamson said.

This has resulted in a relatively slow, under-resourced response by the health department as local municipalities and law enforcement agencies shy away from sharing the burden of enforcement, Adamson said.

"While we are the primary authority, there are other authorities that could take measures that might be faster, like pulling somebody's liquor license or pulling their business permit. ... That's not something that we have the authority to do," she said.

The time to expedite the enforcement process is long overdue, Franks said at the meeting, a sentiment that board members Kelli Wegener, Michael Vijuk, Suzanne Ness and Paula Yensen, all Democrats, agreed with.

Board member Chris Christensen, a Republican, said people also are getting COVID-19 at their homes, not just at restaurants, "so unless you're going to start legislating that, I think you're just penalizing one group of citizenry."

"I don't know how you're going to sit there and pick and choose the winners and losers," he said.

McHenry County's average test positivity rate was more than 20% as of Thursday, Adamson said. The county's case count has seen a 79% increase since she last updated board members Nov. 15, increasing from 5,250 to 9,442 cases, she said.

"We are moving in the wrong direction. We have been, and it's rapidly increasing," she said.

Region 9, which encompasses McHenry and Lake counties, has seen 10 days of positivity rate increases and 10 days of increases in hospital admissions because of COVID-19, Adamson said.

As the region's positivity rate remains well above the IDPH's safety threshold of 8%, McHenry County and its neighbor to the east could move to Tier 2 of additional mitigation measures as soon as next week, she said.

"It takes 14 days, so two weeks total, to kick into the next mitigations, so we could be faced, should this trajectory continue, with Tier 2 mitigations," Adamson said, adding the state could order a transition to Tier 2 "if not by this weekend, potentially by next week."

Nearly all of the county's schools now have transitioned back to remote learning in accordance with a recommendation from the health department.

"You're going to see the cases first, then people start to get ill and then you start to see the push on the hospitals," Adamson said. "Some states have already reached their capacity so that is something that we may be facing here."

The county's hospital bed availability was at 36% as of Thursday and the percentage of residents willing to comply with contact tracing has dwindled to 64%, Public Health Nursing Director Susan Karras said in the meeting Thursday.

Given all of this, Franks told Adamson and Karras to brainstorm what they will need from the board to gain compliance more efficiently and to come back with a proposal by the end of the day Friday so the board can consider it at their regular meeting Tuesday.

"I would support any measures that we have to do to save people's lives," Wegener said. "You mentioned pulling liquor licenses, cease and desist orders. If we can have an accelerated process to do any of these things, I think it would be a good idea."

The health department has been working with Norm Vinton of the McHenry County state's attorney's office in taking the third enforcement step of issuing fines to restaurants that won't comply with the indoor dining ban and in deciding how to respond to lawsuits that restaurants have filed against Gov. J.B. Pritzker's orders, Adamson said in Thursday's update.

The McHenry County health department's environmental division is preparing to send documents on one business to the state's attorney's office for consideration of charges, the first business to be considered for actual punitive action.

"We will review every case on a case-by-case basis for prosecution," Vinton said. "We have not received anything yet, but when we do we'll certainly review it."

According to the state's enforcement guidelines, charges against this business could include a Class A misdemeanor resulting in a fine ranging from $75 to $2,500. It will be up to the state's attorney's office to determine whether these charges could apply to a violation of the new ban on indoor service as well.

The fault for this lack of compliance in the face of a sharp resurgence of the virus does not just lie with the restaurants that disobey the orders or the municipalities that look the other way, but also with the people who patronize those restaurants, Vinton said.

There are "dozens, if not hundreds" of restaurants in noncompliance and all have customers who support them in that decision, he said.

"I think a lot of people have let their guard down," Adamson said. "But this is how the disease is spreading and it is spreading at a very rapid pace."

In a COVID-19 update Thursday, Pritzker said that, if cases continue increasing at the current rate, another stay-at-home order may be the only option left.

Pritzker criticized local elected officials who have failed to enforce the state's mitigations.