Video briefings from the St. Louis Metropolitan Pandemic Task Force’s Dr. Alex Garza are one of the easiest ways to get accurate information about COVID-19 in the St. Louis area. The briefings happen fairly regularly and use simple graphics to help to explain and contextualize the numbers presented.

Dr. Garza’s video briefing yesterday contained some hopeful (and some worrisome) information for people across the St. Louis metro area. In addition to out “promising trends” in the regional data that showed that the city and county mandating masks has resulted in a “decrease in transmissions,” he was careful to warn that it’s “very important not to become complacent.”



He also said that we should expect to see some numbers ebb and flow because we don’t have the universal masking requirements across the metro area that would result in an “interruption of cases.” Are you listening, Governor Parson?

The numbers also show that hospital admissions have dropped recently and are currently trending in the right direction, so that’s also great news.



The bad news, however, is that there are some new COVID-19 hotspots across the St. Louis metro. The current problem areas are easy to see in the giant red splotches on the map displayed by the task force.

While two weeks ago the places where infections were rising the most were Wentzville, O'Fallon, St. Peters, now the red areas have moved farther south into St. Louis county and Jefferson County.

From the briefing:

“You’ve seen us in weeks before where it was out in St. Charles county and then Chesterfield and now the numbers seem to be increasing down in south county so I’ll point out a couple of areas here where we’ve seen some increase. So in Arnold area, in Sappington and in Oakville is where we saw the increase in numbers week over week.”

The task force is also reporting that “the Fenton area also saw a significant spike with 102 new cases last week.”

For more detailed information, you can watch the entire video address below.


Email the author at jaime.lees@riverfronttimes.com

• Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get the latest on the news, things to do and places to eat delivered right to your inbox.
• Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.