It was the lunch hour at Mulligan’s on a sun-splashed Saturday in Vero Beach, and the crowd gathered around the oceanfront restaurant’s bar was ignoring not only the governor’s social-distancing mandate – but also a manager’s request to disperse.
So, the bartenders were told to stop serving drinks until the group left the bar area.
“We’re not going to physically throw you out, but the order says you’ve got to spread out and we’re going to follow it,” Mulligan’s owner George Hart said, adding that the wait for outdoor tables sometimes reached 40 minutes, which contributed to the congestion.
“Some people, though, think the rules don’t apply to them and that they can do whatever they want.”
We saw a similar attitude the weekend before, when nearly 100 people gathered for a youth baseball game at Bob Summers Field – adjacent to the Vero Beach Dog Park – without regard for social distancing, most without facemasks and with boys standing shoulder-to-shoulder in dugouts.
And we continue to see it at local supermarkets, where the number of customers wearing facemasks appears to be decreasing and too many shoppers refuse to obey the signs and arrows urging one-way traffic in the aisles.
Clearly, some people in our community aren’t as worried about this pandemic as others, or they’re feeling safer now that the governor has started to reopen the state’s non-essential businesses.
But should they?
“Just because things are opening up doesn’t mean the threat has gone away,” said Miranda Hawker, health officer with the Florida Department of Health in Indian River County. “This pandemic has been a tremendous hardship for people, and I know everyone wants to get back to normal, but we can’t forget about social distancing, wearing masks and washing our hands.
“We’ve been fortunate to have a lower case count in our county, but those public-health practices are a big reason for that, and we need to continue with them, whether the county is opened up or not,” she added. “Until we get a vaccine, we need to change the way we live for a while.”
Obviously, not everyone is convinced.
Not only do some people believe the worst of this crisis is behind us – Monday was the third consecutive day with no new COVID-19 cases reported in our county, and only one new case had been confirmed in the previous six days – but many are convinced the virus poses no serious health threat to anyone but older residents and those with underlying medical issues.
The relatively low COVID-19 statistics for our county seemed to bolster their position. Overall, we have had only 100 cases, 24 hospitalizations and eight fatalities in a county of 160,000 people.
“How bad can it be?” some are asking.
But then you look at a couple of other relevant numbers and see that, as of last weekend, fewer than 2,300 people – less than 1.5 percent of the county’s population – had been tested.
So, nobody really knows how many COVID-19 cases we’ve had here. Maybe there’ve been 200, or even 300. We don’t know because we weren’t testing then.
More troubling is not knowing how many people here have the virus now, because they’re either asymptomatic or haven’t yet developed the symptoms necessary to be tested in this county. They’re out there, and they could infect others.
That’s why we need more testing – and we need it now.
“I hope we won’t see an increase in cases, but I’m concerned about people continuing to practice social distancing,” Hawker said. “This country hasn’t had a pandemic in a very long time. We’re blessed to live in a time of vaccine-preventable diseases, which often is taken for granted. But this is no time to get complacent and let our guards down.”
Unfortunately, not everyone has gotten the message.
One out-of-town visitor who witnessed Saturday’s lunch rush at Mulligan’s had been out on the nearby beach, and said social distancing didn’t appear to be a priority. “It looked like spring break,” said the woman, who was visiting her mother and asked that her name not be used
Both Sheriff’s Maj. Eric Flowers and Vero Beach Police Chief David Currey said the governor’s decision to begin reopening the state hasn’t changed the way their agencies will enforce his order.
They said deputies and police officers will respond to complaints, but they won’t be staking out local stores and restaurants, looking to catch business owners and customers violating social-distancing requirements.
That means, for the most part, we’ll be policing ourselves, which is how it should be in a small-town community as special as ours.
So, regardless of whether you believe the virus poses any threat, you need to understand that many of your neighbors are worried, and even scared.
We need to get through this new normal together – because it might be a while before we get back to the old one.
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