‘Phase Two’ in Rappahannock County

Health district assists local businesses with ‘Forward Virginia’

Whitney Wright, Environmental Health Manager for the Rappahannock Rapidan Health District, says his office has been extremely busy over the past few days making certain local businesses are ready to open their doors.

On June 5, Virginia Governor Ralph Northam gave the green light for most of Virginia to move into Phase Two of his “Forward Virginia” plan. The new guidelines allow food establishments to serve guests indoors at no more than fifty percent occupancy and give fitness centers permission to reopen along with museums, sporting venues, performing arts venues and swimming pools.

Wright oversees the health and safety of Rappahannock, Fauquier, Culpeper, Madison and Orange counties. In normal times his office works primarily with food establishments and campgrounds, but these days he communicates with just about every kind of business.

“With the COVID-19 response we’ve found ourselves responding to businesses that we don’t normally regulate, for example barber shops or beauty salons or churches, you know, brick and mortar retail businesses,” Wright says.

To support the volume of businesses that rely on the health department for guidance, food inspectors that used to perform routine restaurant assessments have shifted into new roles.

“[They] have been calling individual permitted establishments to . . . help them walk through each individual business’s setup,” Wright says. “Just so that everybody feels comfortable moving into the next phase.”

The inspectors aren’t the only ones who have moved into different roles during the coronavirus pandemic. In March, Wright says, half of the district’s environmental health staff were recruited to assist with an emergency contact tracing effort.

“We basically had about six field staff that were left with the other responsibilities that Environmental Health continued to do with all this,” he says.

“As we’ve started to move into Phase One and into Phase Two we’ve been able to get some contract workers in place so that not only Environmental Health staff can go back to doing their normal work duties but also our clinical staff has been able to . . . pick up their clinical practice again.”

Wright emphasizes that the health department approaches violations on a case-by-case basis and is mainly focusing its efforts on educating business owners.

“[In] some situations people don’t know . . . [that] what they were doing was maybe not exactly what they should’ve been,” he says. “It’s been really a community wide effort between the health department and the businesses to make sure the community is doing the right thing.”

If the metrics remain favorable and cases of COVID-19 do not spike, Northam may present Phase Three of reopening in four to six weeks.

“We get a lot of questions about what Phase Three will look like,” Wright says. “[But] we haven’t received any information ahead of time. It’s going to be a slow transition.”