CUSTER COUNTY, Colo. — The Custer County Board of Health will not bring back COVID-19 restrictions, even after an outbreak that led to all three of its members testing positive.
Two of the three Board of Health members, who are also county commissioners, voted at the beginning of March to drop all restrictions and leave the state's dial entirely.
At the time, the county had very few cases, a low positivity rate and no hospitalizations. The Board said it would still encourage people to wear masks and follow social distancing rules.
A week later, the Board voted unanimously to reaffirm that decision, even though the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment threatened sanctions against the county for ignoring public health orders.
Since then, the county has reported at least nine new cases, including two members of the Board of Health. The last member, Kevin Day, says he and his wife received positive results through rapid tests and are waiting for confirmation through PCR test results.
The county's public health department believes most of the new cases are tied to a county courthouse meeting, which Commissioner Tom Flower described as mostly mask-less and without social distancing. All three Board of Health members were in attendance. The news was first reported by the local newspaper, the Wet Mountain Tribune.
The Board met Wednesday for the first time in nearly three weeks. Flower was the only member to attend in-person, as he had just completed his quarantine. He was the only one to vote against lifting restrictions initially. In the meeting this week, Flower pushed for a new metric to decide when to bring restrictions back.
"This board sat here and voted that if we had an outbreak of 3-percent or more we would do something about it," he said. "People in this county want to know what we're going to do."
The meeting ended without a decision on a clear metric. Instead, the county's public health agency says they will make decisions based on outbreaks' specific circumstances. "The [Board of Health] believes in assessing every case individually based on the specifics of that situation and making decisions accordingly," the agency said in a Facebook post.
"We voted to do what we did," Commissioner and Board of Health Member Bill Canda said. "We aren't in a situation that I can see that would warrant us shutting down any businesses or mandating masks."
"I still wholeheartedly believe that what we did was the right thing to do," Commissioner and Board of Health Member Kevin Day said in the meeting. "It doesn't matter that I got 'the COVID' now. It has not changed my mind."
Flower also pushed for the county's public health agency to reinstate its local contact tracing team, rather than relying upon state contact tracers. The Board of Health and the county's public health department agreed to consider whether that would be feasible.
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