Monroe County businesses won’t reopen until May 15 at the soonest after the Monroe County Public Health Authority on Friday extended the local public health declaration. The new order prolongs “stay-at-home” guidelines Indiana residents have been following since March.
The county’s decision is stricter than Gov. Eric Holcomb’s Friday announcement that many Indiana businesses could start reopening this week.
Dr. Tom Sharp is the Monroe County Health Commissioner. He says the county wants to follow the Centers for Disease Control recommendation that reported cases numbers decline for two weeks before businesses start to open up.
“We don’t have a two-week pattern that is down trending. We have flattening," Sharp says. "For the health of people in Monroe County we want to be as conservative as we possibly could be without belaboring the point.”
Sharp says the county hopes to catch up with the rest of the state in the governor’s five-stage plan to reopen the economy, but that will depend on case numbers and other data made available with further testing.
Sharp says though the state put a reopening dates forward, none of those are set in stone.
"They put out a date and that's really good," he says. "But we can't say 100 percent that date will stay the same anymore than we can predict the future here in the county. It all depends on how people behave."
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