Rural Randolph County has one of the highest COVID-19 infection rates in Illinois. Here’s what happened.
Editor’s note: This story was originally published by The Southern Illinoisan.
Gilster-Mary Lee Corp.’s food products — staple pantry items such as cereals, soups, pasta and canned soups — are in high demand worldwide as restaurants have curtailed business in response to COVID-19, driving more people into grocery stores. But even as business production ramped up, the manufacturer has also been forced to contend with an outbreak of the virus that affected nearly half of its administrative staff and resulted in the death of its president and chief executive officer, Don Welge.
“We had a number of precautions in place but the very contagious nature of the virus is what shocked us in how quickly it hit a number of people, myself included,” said Tom Welge, a company vice president whose father died Thursday in a St. Louis hospital. As of Thursday, three other employees were hospitalized. “It was very surprising. You know it’s contagious and you’re doing things to protect people, but still, it’s like nothing we’ve really probably ever come across.”
The company’s headquarters is in Chester, the county seat of Randolph County, which has suffered one of the highest COVID-19 per-capita infection rates in Illinois, according to The Southern Illinoisan’s analysis of Illinois Department of Public Health data.
Its infection rate lags Chicago, Cook County and a handful of other northern counties that have been ground zero of the outbreak in Illinois, but it is significantly higher than most others throughout downstate Illinois.
“I think people need to hear that and they need to understand why we have been so stern with our warnings,” said Angie Oathout, administrator of the Randolph County Health Department.
What happened here offers a cautionary tale on how quickly the virus can spread to devastating consequences, even in a rural county that is at least half farmland. It may also be looked to as a case study as some downstate political leaders push Gov. J.B. Pritzker to loosen his stay-at-home order and empower local officials with the ability to reopen some shuttered businesses.
“It could get to anywhere and everywhere, and it doesn’t care what color or how much money you have in your pocket, or whether you live in a big city or a small town,” said Chester Mayor Tom Page. “It can affect anybody in any given time.”
Page said he understands that people are growing impatient with so many businesses closed and school canceled for the rest of the year, especially as the weather warms and people are eager to get back to their normal lives. But Page said he is concerned that easing restrictions too soon could cause serious problems for his small town, home to two large state facilities, Menard Correctional Center and Chester Mental Health. The coronavirus has already wreaked havoc on Gilster-Mary Lee.
Over the past few weeks, some 50 employees at the company’s Chester headquarters either tested positive or were quarantined due to showing possible symptoms of COVID-19, or because they had been around someone in the office with a confirmed case or symptoms, Tom Welge said. He had only been released from isolation due to his own COVID-19 diagnosis for a few days when his father passed away. Don Welge, a well-known Southern Illinois businessman and advocate for Southern Illinois and Southeast Missouri, is the first person in Randolph County to succumb from the disease caused by the coronavirus.
As of Friday evening, Randolph County had reported 51 cases of COVID-19. Of that number, 32 have been released to resume normal activity, three remained hospitalized and one person — Welge — had died. Oathout said the recoveries are encouraging, but “we’re not out of the woods yet.”
Based on Illinois Department of Public Health data, as of Friday, Randolph County, and neighboring Monroe County, both had known infection rates of about 150 per 100,000 people. These were the highest rates of any county south of Kankakee.
The two counties with the highest infection rates were Cook County (including Chicago and county cases), at about 370 per 100,000 people, and Lake County, at about 270 per 100,000 people.
Jackson County’s infection rate is about half of Randolph’s, at about 70 per 100,000 people. Williamson County’s infection rate was about 20 per 100,000 people, and in Franklin County, it was about 12 per 100,000 people. The infection rate in St. Clair County, which neighbors Randolph County to the north, was nearly 100 per 100,000 people.
“I don’t want my residents to let their guard down,” Oathout said. “I want them to understand that what they have been doing is reflecting on why we have people recovering, and why we’re starting to see a slow-down in cases.”
Oathout said that Randolph County’s early surge in cases can be largely traced to a single event in mid-March. The ripple effect from that event illustrates how connected rural areas can be, and how miles of open space may provide a false sense of security about COVID-19’s reach.
On March 15, “there was a group gathering that took place in a public setting,” Oathout said. “And from that group gathering, we had about five individuals that came up positive.” That was the same afternoon that Gov. J.B. Prtizker announced he was closing bars and restaurants to in-house dining across Illinois, allowing only drive-through and take-out service. His order was not effective until the following day, and the people who gathered that weekend were not in violation of it.
One of those individuals who attended the gathering and later tested positive for COVID-19 soon after went to work at a large employer in Chester, Oathout said. She did not identify the public gathering nor the individual’s employer.
“He actually came to work and was not aware that he was positive and was starting to show some signs and symptoms and worked for about three or four days before he went to the doctor,” Oathout said. “So because of the exposure period, he exposed multiple individuals who ended up positive.”
On the day of the social outing, there were fewer than 100 confirmed COVID-19 cases in Illinois and none in Illinois’ southernmost 17 counties, including Randolph.
It was another two weeks, on Sunday, March 29, before the Randolph County Health Department reported its first two cases, but the disease — officially undetected until then in the county — had already spread rapidly under the radar.
By that Friday — five days later — the county had confirmed 17 cases. “That’s how fast and quickly it happened,” Oathout said.
Oathout said the vast majority, though not all, of Randolph County’s cases point back to that one event. She said this became apparent after the first cases were confirmed and officials undertook investigations, which are standard practice, to determine who else those with the disease may have come into contact with, so that they could advise them to quarantine.
“The positive cases had some of the same close contacts on their lists,” she said. “So we asked them, ‘How do you know each other, and why are they a close contact?’ and then it came out, ‘Well, we were at this outing together on Sunday.’”
“I don’t think they realized that the virus was here,” she said. “And I don’t think they completely understood how quickly it spreads.”
State Sen. Paul Schimpf, R-Waterloo, said he didn’t have adequate information to speculate on the cause, but said that it is not shocking that Randolph County’s infection rate is higher than other counties in Southern Illinois. “If you would have told me at the start of this that Randolph County would have a significant number of cases that would not have surprised me just because of the state facilities, with Menard and Chester Mental Health,” he said. “Those facilities are almost powder kegs waiting to go off.”
Though neither facility has seen an outbreak yet, that possibility continues to concern Oathout as the county works to tamp down the spread of the disease. Oathout said she has been in close communication with state officials and they continue to monitor the situation. “We have got the attention of the Illinois Department of Public Health,” she said.
Schimpf is advocating that the governor give local health officials the power to begin reopening some shuttered businesses in areas where hospital and ventilator capacity is sufficient. Though Randolph County has experienced a high infection rate compared to other downstate counties, its hospital systems have not been overwhelmed. But Oathout said she remains concerned about how quickly that could happen if there were to be an outbreak in a large facility here. The case numbers are deescalating in Randolph County because of the restrictive measures put into place, she said.
Welge said Gilster-Mary Lee had started discussions by early March about how to protect its employees and the business operation. Much of the focus of those early conversations focused on safety precautions for its factory workers, who make products shipped throughout the U.S. and around the world.
He was surprised that it was the business office that was hit hardest. “We don’t have a lot of people working shoulder-to-shoulder in an office environment,” he said. Oathout said that 13 employees of the Chester employer tested positive for COVID-19 who live in Randolph County. Additional employees who tested positive live in other Illinois and Missouri counties and commute to work there, but she was not able to say how many. Welge said that as more people tested positive, others with symptoms who were otherwise relatively healthy were directed to forgo a test, assume they had the illness and quarantine at home.
Welge, who was isolated at home away from his family until only a few days ago, said he suffered only mild symptoms. He never ran a fever, but had headaches and a bit of a cough. It wasn’t a dry, relentless cough like many people with COVID-19 report, but more of a light cough, he said. He also experienced chills and lethargy for a few days. “I’ve had flus that were worse, and colds even. And then there’s people it obviously hits a lot harder,” he said.
Tom Welge said that the family, and many at the company, are saddened by the loss of his dad, who had been with Gilster-Mary Lee for more than 60 years, and oversaw its massive expansion from 200 employees to more than 3,000 across four states. He was 84, and in a high-risk category as a senior, but otherwise relatively healthy for his age, Welge said.
“If there’s any good out of this, is that people need to realize that while most people aren’t going to be severely ill from it, as I recovered from it myself, there’s a certain percent of people that this can obviously be fatal for,” he said. “We all need to take it seriously.”