A visit to Illinois’ last COVID-free corner
Scott County hasn’t seen a single case: ‘None of us are wearing masks’
WINCHESTER, Ill. — The virus that has raced around the globe and killed more than 100,000 in the U.S. alone has yet to reach one small community in Illinois.
Scott County, with a population of about 4,951, is the only one of Illinois’ 102 counties that has not yet reported a single case of COVID-19.
The mayor of Winchester, the 1,458-population county seat, suspects it’s because so few people move in and out, lowering the risk of anyone bringing the virus in.
The local public health official thinks they might have actually had a few cases early on, but no one was getting tested back then.
Some residents — particularly the younger crowd — think the whole pandemic has been overblown.
“We think it’s more political than anything,” said Dalton Schoenfelder, 20, a laid-off factory worker. “It’s not as bad as people portray it out to be.”
While many downstate Illinois communities have been devastated by the coronavirus and its economic impact — with outbreaks at nursing homes, businesses closed and workers laid off, tiny Scott County is the corner of Illinois that the coronavirus forgot.
No one knows exactly why the small, central Illinois county about 250 miles southwest of Chicago has been spared the worst of the outbreak. Some attribute it to the small population.
“We just don’t experience the flow of people coming in and out like you would in some of these larger cities,” said Winchester Mayor Rex McIntire.
Some point out that no reported cases of COVID-19 does not mean the virus hasn’t come to Scott County.
Some residents work in nearby Jacksonville, located in Morgan County which has had 42 reported cases of COVID-19 and one death. A few Scott County residents work at the nearby JBS slaughterhouse in Beardstown, located about 31 miles away in Cass County, which has seen 74 cases of COVID-19, some involving workers at the plant.
Steve Shireman, the health administrator for Scott County, said it’s possible some had the virus early on, as many in the county showed symptoms but could not get tested.
In Winchester, the shops and salons have just begun to slowly open, as in the rest of the state.
The heart of the city is Winchester’s town square, a small grassy park home to a statue of Stephen Douglas, the Illinois Senator who famously debated Abraham Lincoln after squaring off with the future president in the Scott County courthouse over the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854.
The business strip had only just begun to spring back to life a few years before the pandemic.
And many worried it would snap right back where it was, thanks to Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s March 21 stayat-home order.
Callie Gregory owns Studio 29 Salon and Spa, just off the main square. Like many across the state, she couldn’t get unemployment benefits because of the massive backlog. Now, her salon is open again, and she hopes the worst is behind them.
“We’ve been here eight years, and in that eight years, a lot of small businesses opened,” Gregory said. “And when you shut them down for two months, it’s like, wait a minute, we were just getting our little community going.”
Jeff Pittman, an alderman in Winchester and owner of The Pitt Stop, a restaurant along the square, said he had to lay off his two fulltime and three part-time waitresses. Now, it’s just him and his son, with the occasional help from his son’s girlfriend, serving take-out on the sidewalk.
Three of his customers — Schoenfelder and two others — are in their early 20s, and all are skeptical of the severity of the pandemic. Young and old in the county agree there’s a generational divide on the seriousness of the threat, with older residents worrying, and younger folk scoffing.
As he waits for his food, Camden Cockerill, 20, explains he was hurt on his job in nearby Jacksonville, his left hand in a cast after a crane operator dropped an I-beam on it and “almost cut my hand in half.”
Cockerill, now living on workmen’s compensation, said the hospital wanted to administer a COVID-19 test before treating him in the emergency room.
But Cockerill said his boss jumped in and argued that no one in Scott County was infected with the virus, so they should just admit him right away to take care of his hand, which was basically “falling off.”
Like his boss, Cockerill is convinced Scott County has little to fear from COVID-19.
“None of us have changed,” Cockerill said of his friends. “None of us are wearing masks. All of us are still living our daily lives: going boating, going four-wheel riding, still riding bikes around town coming to get food. None of us have changed anything.”