by Dennis Dalman
At the Jan. 10 Sartell City Council meeting, a CentraCare family doctor urged the council members – all of them masked – to quickly adopt a citywide mandatory-mask policy that would last for four to six weeks.
“The situation is dire,” said Dr. Kim Tjaden, who is also a local public-health consultant who works with health departments.
In December, she and 165 of her colleagues wrote letters to all area cities, spelling out how dire the highly infectious Omicron virus variant has become and urging mask mandates. The cities include Sartell, St. Cloud, Sauk Rapids and Waite Park.
Officials of those cities responded to Tjaden, noting they won’t initiate local mask mandates, but they did all agree to sign a joint message that urges residents to wear masks while indoors, to practice distancing other than with co-workers and family members, to wash hands frequently and to remain at home if they become sick.
The mayors of St. Cloud, Sauk Rapids and Waite Park said a mask mandate would be virtually impossible to enforce consistently, partly because there are not enough police officers.
On Monday, Jan. 10 (the day of the Sartell council meeting), there were 119 people hospitalized in St. Cloud with Covid-19, said Tjaden, adding that 77 percent of them were unvaccinated.
She also said that as of Jan. 6, nearly 50 percent of those who took Covid tests at CentraCare tested positive. That percentage did not include those who were tested elsewhere, such as at other clinics or drive-through testing sites. Tjaden said she had never seen such a high rate of hospital admissions for pediatric patients due to Covid symptoms.
Covid patients take up 70 percent of the critical-care beds locally, which means there is a limited number of beds for people who have had heart attacks, strokes or who suffered other traumas, such as from car crashes or accidents. Rationing may soon become a dreaded reality, Tjaden noted.
“The sky is truly falling,” said Tjaden, adding that “misinformation abounds, but the facts do not play politics.
Tjaden listed the facts:
Infection rates are 2.5 times worse than this past fall; more children, teachers and caregivers are getting Covid symptoms; hospitals are full and clinics are overburdened; staff shortages are increasing and 800 CentraCare employees are at home because of their own Covid infections/sicknesses or because they are taking care of a family member who is sick; some businesses cannot remain open due to staff sicknesses.
She continued:
New, promising treatments are showing hope, but they are in short supply; the hospital has reinstated a no-visitors policy; if 80 percent of people would wear masks, it could prevent an estimated 800 deaths, according to the Mayo Clinic, and medical-grade masks are the best kinds to wear, Tjaden noted.
“We are not asking for a shut-down,” she said to the council. “We are trying to avoid a sick-down.”
Tjaden pleaded with the council to be leaders in the fight against the pandemic.
“You have the power. Lead the wider community. Do not wait for the state or the county. Please put a mask-required policy in place . . . The livelihood of our community depends upon it.”
Sartell Mayor Ryan Fitzthum thanked Tjaden for her presentation and vowed that he and the council would continue to have direct conversations among city staff and with medical/public-health experts like Tjaden.
Also last week, during a press conference, Minnesota Health Commissioner Jan Malcom had this to say:
“We’ve talked a lot about the fact that the staff, doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists and everybody have been running flat out for two years now. And they’re exhausted. And some that have moved on, moved to different specialties, left altogether or gone to part-time just as a way to continue to take care of themselves. So we have less staffing than we had during the biggest peak. So it’s not an issue of how many beds we have; it’s an issue of how many skilled staff we have to care for people.”
