Sioux Falls stay-at-home order to go away with new plan to work with businesses
April 20, 2020
The city of Sioux Falls plans to work with those places that generate the largest numbers of people gathering instead of potentially issuing a broader stay-at-home order.
It has not been determined if the city will pull the ordinance when it goes before the City Council or if the council will vote it down.
Instead, the city will announce a plan called SOAR on Tuesday, which stands for Supporting Operations and Resiliency.
It will focus on enhanced measures large business can take to control the spread of COVID-19.
“That’s really where the big issues are,” Mayor Paul TenHaken said. “We will be working with our business community, specifically some of our larger employers, to get resources and tools, including on-site spot checks to make sure they are utilizing best practices in slowing the spread of COVID.”
The program will include weekly training, on-site checks by the city Health Department, some of which will be done on site and could be in response to employee concerns.
“My office has become the hotline for employees who are concerned about business practices,” TenHaken said.
“We’re going to provide some pretty clear recommendations, not ordinances, but regarding temperature checks for employees and visitors, how do you visually screen shoppers in a business and do that in a nondiscriminatory fashion.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released additional guidance on that over the weekend, he said.
“The quicker businesses can adapt their business practices, slow the spread of COIVD, the quicker they will be back to normal,” TenHaken said.
“I know of some employees who are leaving companies because they don’t feel safe. They’re quitting. They’re going somewhere else. Businesses that take COVID mitigation seriously now are going to be better poised to reopen and reopen quickly.”
The hope is those enhanced mitigation efforts will slow the spread enough to give the health care systems more breathing room at their peak usage, which is still expected to be sometime in May.
Cases related to Smithfield have dropped to single digits, TenHaken said.
“The Smithfield issue is on the downslope. Now we’re just seeing community spread in the other areas,” he said. “So that’s what we’re dealing with now.”
Sioux Falls hospitals also could see an influx of patients from Worthington, Minn., the mayor warned. The JBS pork processing plant there has reported more than two dozen employees who tested positive in the past couple of days. It closed indefinitely on Monday.
Patients from Worthington could be treated in Sioux Falls.
“What this will really do is we need to continue to look at how can we as a community continue to get a little more of a buffer,” TenHaken said. “So if the JBS hot spot creeps up or something like that, we have a buffer. We need to look at where the problem areas are.”
Sioux Falls remains in the top 10 percent of metro areas in cases per capita. So far, the hospitalization rate has been less than 5 percent, with about 50 patients currently hospitalized in the city, he said.
“We’re at basically the beginning of that surge.”
