Portage businesses tentatively reopen
Concerns remain about the city’s high rate of COVID-19 infections
Lianne Loving, the owner of Moods Pub in Portage, kept her business open for carryout after the COVID-19 pandemic put a stop to on-site dining.
By May 11, per the staged lifting of Gov. Eric Holcomb’s stay-athome order, she could open her dining room up at 50% occupancy, which she did, taking out half the seating and switching to disposable eating utensils among other measures to increase social distancing and get a better handle on sanitizing.
She lost a couple of employees concerned about taking the virus home to young families when they got off work, which Loving said she understands.
Loving, a lifelong Portage resident, is well aware of the fact that
Portage Township is the hotspot for the new coronavirus in Porter County, with the most cases and deaths from the virus. As of Friday, Portage Township had 185 of the county’s 467 total positives and 10 of its 21 deaths, far more than any of the county’s other 11 townships, according to figures on the county’s COVID-19 dashboard.
The high numbers, Loving said, are a concern.
“When we opened, it was only going to be for Portage people,” said, adding adjacent Lake County was still shut down and, with limited capacity, she wanted to give her regulars priority.
And frankly, she wanted to keep the virus from further spreading in her community. “The infection rate would be worse with the infection rate in Lake County being so high,” she said.
She’s fielded questions on the pub’s Facebook page about whether Lake County diners and drinkers would be welcome once Moods Pub can increase to full seating.
“My answer was, we’ll wait till it gets to 100%, but I’m not promising anything,” she said. “Even if the state says we’re at 100%, we might still keep it at 50 or 75%. Who knows?”
City, township and county officials said Portage Township’s numbers are higher for an assortment of reasons. Those include the township being the most populous in the county. And its proximity to Lake County, which is one of the hotspots in the state and is opening up on a slower timeline, especially since many Portage Township residents work in Lake County and the residents there take advantage of Portage’s many big box stores on U.S. 6.
Still, officials hope to ramp up testing for the virus in the township by moving a state testing site from Valparaiso to Portage.
The township has just under 50,000 residents, including the city of Portage, unincorporated South Haven, the town of Ogden Dunes and the unincorporated area of Duck Creek, said Portage Township Trustee Brendan Clancy.
“We are the New Jersey to New York. Look at New Jersey’s numbers compared to New York’s,” he said of the virus cases in those adjacent states. “A certain percentage of our residents work on Chicago or Lake County and Lake County residents shop in Portage.”
The majority of Portage Township’s cases, he said, are because of its proximity to Lake County and not a lack of social distancing or other precautions by the township’s residents.
“We also have a large population of residents that work in the mills or other businesses that are still functioning. All that contributes,” he said. “I don’t think there’s any magic bullet comparison.”
Portage Mayor Sue Lynch noted the need for more testing as well as contact tracing, though some people are uncomfortable sharing that information, though both would provide a truer picture of the virus in the township.
“There’s so many questions unanswered,” she said, adding people need to understand “they can still catch this.”
County Council President Jeremy Rivas, D-2nd District, whose district includes the township, agrees, and has been pushing for more testing for Portage Township, particularly since a lot of the township’s residents are considered essential and have worked throughout the shutdown.
“Let’s contain our hotspot so it doesn’t spread to the rest of the county,” he said, adding that effort includes more testing and contact tracing to limit the spread of the virus.
Rivas, Clancy and Dr. Maria Stamp, the county’s health officer with the Porter County Health Department, had hoped to move a state testing site from the U.S. Army National Guard Armory in Valparaiso to the former site of NorthShore Health Center on U.S. 6. The testing site, a partnership between the Indiana State Department of Health and OptumServe Health Services, is one of 50 across the state that opened this month.
Stamp said Friday that the contract for the testing site made a location change impossible for the time being, though it will be reevaluated at the end of the month.
“It could certainly happen in the future,” she said.
The number of cases in Portage Township, she said, are striking when looking at the map on Porter County’s COVID -19 dashboard, though “it kind of goes in order on a population basis.” Center Township is next in number of cases, and population.
Washington Township’s numbers went up with cases at the Porter County Jail there and both Portage and Center townships have had some cases in nursing homes, including around 30 cases at a facility in Portage Township, Stamp said.
“I suspect people in Lake County came to Portage Township to do business because it was open,” Stamp said. “But even though our numbers have increased in the past two weeks, since Stage 2 of Back on Track (by Gov. Holcomb), other than the nursing home clusters, they haven’t increased significantly.”
She predicted that Stage 3 of Holcomb’s plan will be more telling, which just started and allows for the opening of gyms and social gatherings of up to 100 people.
“That makes me, as a health officer, really nervous, because we know clusters of COVID have come from things like bars with live music,” she said, though that combination doesn’t open up until the next stage. “Everybody needs to step back and assess their risk. Are you ready to partake in that activity and who in my household am I putting at risk?”
While municipal officials can reopen more slowly than the state allows if they so choose, Lynch said she thinks the public will decide when they feel safe enough to venture out.
“I hope that some time before Labor Day we can have a music festival in the park,” she said.
Back at Moods Pub, Loving, the owner, showed off the clear plastic face shield that snapped to her black baseball cap. With her own health problems, she said she’s been limiting her time at the pub.
Business has been slow since the dining room opened back up, she said, and customers are still getting used to the changes. At lunchtime on a recent afternoon, a handful of regulars sat at the tables.
That included Terry Music, a construction worker who stopped by for a quick drink. He showed up at Moods Pub the day after the dining room reopened, too, to check things out.
Music, who lives in Portage, also is keeping an eye on the township’s COVID-19 rate. He’s OK with precautions being taken to slow the spread of the virus and added he usually wears a mask, though when he ran into the store for something recently and he didn’t have one on, just about everybody else did.
“We’ve got to do what we’ve got to do. I get a little upset with people on the news, ‘What about my Constitutional rights?,’ throwing a fit,” Music said. “Put a mask on and get in and get out.”