The Ellsworth Area Chamber of Commerce hosted an insightful meeting recently that gave its members firsthand information on Pierce County and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Meeting virtually on the Zoom platform, Kim Beebe of the chamber executive team started things off, introducing the speakers at the meeting that included Pierce County Public Health Director AZ Snyder and Pierce County Economic Development Corp. Executive Director Joe Folsom.

The chamber set up the meeting by board members doing in-person calls to members to see how they are doing under the Safe at Home order by Gov. Tony Evers.

“All the board members have been reaching out to you to check in on you and your businesses,” said Beebe. “We know you guys are facing some big challenges.”

Initially, businesses needed to see what they are allowed to do, and soon will be the next step.

“Initially there was panic and shock to get your businesses adapted to the various orders. Sometimes things were changing hourly, daily for sure,” said Beebe. “The next thing is where do we go from here? We just aren’t sure what the future’s going to look like. What should we plan for moving forward? There are so many things we don’t know.”

Snyder said Pierce County businesses have been respectful and excellent to work with.

“Thank you to all the business owners in the Ellsworth area. Talking to some of my colleagues across the state, some of them have had really antagonistic business relationships. I haven’t had that here. I’ve had great questions. I’ve had opportunities for dialog. I really feel like the business community in Ellsworth has been incredibly supportive of public health and also just wants to do the right thing for our community.”

“I know this is an incredibly stressful situation for business owners. There’s a lot of uncertainty. I just appreciate you guys have been calling me, and we’ve had open and honest dialog,” said Snyder.

It’s been a whirlwind for Pierce County Public Health since March 9 when Wisconsin’s second confirmed COVID-19 case happened to be from Prescott. After that, there was an outbreak in Ellsworth related to a spring break school trip to New Orleans.

“On March 9, Pierce County received the second confirmed case of COVID-19 in Wisconsin. I did not think we were going to go second. I couldn’t believe it happened to us, but I’m glad it happened to us,” said Snyder. “It forced us to be prepared. We were really in a good situation to set up for success for the next several months.”

As of Sunday of this week, there have been 10 confirmed cases of the virus in Pierce County and six probable cases.

“They were people that were in close contact to someone who had the virus,” Snyder said. “We do expect there were many cases in Pierce County that have not been identified for lack of testing capacity.”

Pierce County Public Health acted fast in the Ellsworth outbreak.

“I’m sure all of you are aware we had a cluster of cases in Ellsworth last month. We worked very hard to prevent that cluster from getting any larger.

“That’s a real community victory for us, that we were able to identify cases, conduct very aggressive contact tracing, provide resources to those households to insure that they could maintain quarantine or isolation and then really engaging the community as much as we were able with providing good advice for them and information.”

In the event of a new case, Public Health works with that person to go back 14 days in attempt to find all contacts that person had.

“We’re doing a lot of training internally. We only have four public health nurses at Pierce County Public Health. None of them are sleeping. None of us are sleeping. We want to make sure in case we do get an influx of positive cases, the county is prepared to contact each one of those people,” she said.

Public Health is doing a lot of community guidance outreach right now too, and Snyder told people to stay abreast at the organization’s Facebook site.

One big thing business owners want to know is when communities will be allowed to reopen.

“One of the most frequent question I get is when can we reopen? When is it going to be safe?” she said.

She said the testing plan is being put in place with the help of the National Guard.

She said Pierce County is working on a plan to be unveiled when the governor’s order ends.

“We want to make sure our community is ready to reopen safely,” she said. “The goal is to prepare all sectors of our community to reopen safely and responsibly and confidently with our most vulnerable populations in mind.”

Testing is foremost

“We need to insure all Pierce County residents who develop symptoms regardless of insurance status or who their provider is has access to a test,” she said.

Some non-county staff is also being trained at tracing so they can work with any new patients.

Pierce County Health will release a ready-toreopen toolkit as guidance for businesses when they can reopen.

Folsom urged business owners to take stock of their operations right now.

“Most businesses will be impacted,” he said. ”Your business is likely to be different than it was six months ago. Your customers and your customer relationships will be changed. With that in mind, try and figure things out and put all this together.”

He said that businesses should rely on help and programs available through Pierce County Economic Development and SCORE.

He said businesses need to look for new opportunities.

“On the opportunities, what has changed? What has changed with the competition? Did some of them not adapt? Are some of them not there? Is there somewhere new you can fill in?” he said. “Take a few minutes to do a down and dirty analysis of your business, but you don’t have to do this alone. Tap into some of the many resources that are available.”

Some public events have been cancelled, and some are still up in the air.

Snyder said public gatherings will be phased in, and there’s no set schedule.

“It will be phased back in. A lot of us have questions about things like county fairs or UFO Days. I wish I knew,” she said.

More guidance is coming soon in this area, she said.

Beebe noted that the Ellsworth Farmers Market will go on as planned this summer but other community events are still up in the air.