With Gov. DeSantis’ ‘Safer at Home’ executive order set to expire on May 1, Indian River County Administrator Jason Brown advised County Commissioners at their meeting Tuesday to be cautious about re-opening the county for business as usual in order to avoid a second wave of deadly coronavirus cases.
Brown recommended a future re-opening to happen in stages – not all at once.
“When we open things back up, there may not be one specific day. There is a range of things going on over time,” Brown said. “From a local standpoint, we might open golf courses and beaches before we open up the permitting for face-to-face [transactions]. If we have to kind of hold our fire for another week or something, that’s better than coming back and having to do this for six weeks and having to do this later. It could be painful, but another week of rolling some things out could benefit us by not having that second wave.
Brown said Indian River County residents are “doing a great job” of practicing social distancing while out in public and he echoed recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention to wear a face mask on trips to the grocery store when maintaining social distancing isn’t always possible.
Commissioner Bob Solari, wearing a mask and sitting apart from his colleagues who were on the dais, agreed. Half-joking, he quoted from an 18th-century Austrian quarantine law that ordered violators to be shot.
Commissioner Peter O’Bryan recalled the 2004 back-to-back hurricanes that wreaked heavy destruction in the county and frazzled residents’ nerves and willingness to cooperate in recovery efforts.
“If we relax and have another spike and have to go back to this, it’ll be just like the hurricanes,” O’Bryan said. “There won’t be as much cooperation because people will be done with this. We should be slow and cautious as we think about re-opening.”
