HOLLAND (WHTC-AM/FM) — In the midst of a presentation by Ottawa County health officials, County Commission Chairman Roger Bergman interrupted.
“Hold on. Hold on just a minute,” he said. “You know what? We have some business before the commission that we want to be able to accomplish today, and we have a lot of distraction happening in our vestibule there and unless that calms down, I’m going to have to ask that they be removed from the hallway there. I think I have the authority to do that.”
He meant noise from a crowd of people, some of whom were passionately against the mask mandates, and others who were appealing to county officials to support it. County officials have repeatedly said their hands are legally tied.
As the noise continued, Bergman turned his attention to Sheriff’s deputies in the room.
“It’s too noisy. We can’t hardly hear what’s going on and we have business to accomplish today,” he said, adding, “I don’t know how you guys feel, but, officers?”
As the deputies opened the commission chambers’ doors to talk to the crowd in the county administration building’s lobby, shouts of “USA! USA! USA!” filled the room.
Sheriff Steve Kempker later told WHTC the deputies didn’t make anyone leave the meeting. Instead, they talked to the noise makers and convinced them to quiet down. He estimated the audience to have included about 1,000 people, with differing opinions, coming and going during the meeting which lasted nearly seven hours.
Bergman on Wednesday, Aug. 25, 2021, issued a statement saying in part that while he “was impressed with the number of citizens who showed up yesterday to express themselves,” he was also “very disappointed by the organized effort to bully and intimidate anyone who dared to speak in favor of a mask mandate in schools.”
Bergman noted that county-wide epidemic orders “are extremely rare and typically generate intense controversy, which is why our state legislature has insured that those decisions are made by the county health officials exclusively.”
He reaffirmed that county commissioners by law have no power to make or reverse such epidemic orders and cannot fire the county’s health officer over such decisions. But Bergman also noted some of the issues raised during public comment would be explored by commissioners.
Commission meetings, which are not typically well attended by the public, have seen crowds of passionate people wanting to influence how county health officials handle the COVID-19 pandemic.
Comments made by those watching the livestream of the meeting on YouTube were rife with misinformation about who is most-likely to catch COVID-19, what might happen if someone did get sick, what treatments were available, and whether government officials could be trusted.
Hudsonville resident Casey Koopmans was among the first to speak during public comment, expressing his concern for his son, Sam, who developed several disabilities after contracting a virus as a baby. Koopmans advocated for masks and other preventative measures, in part because he doesn’t want his son to lose his hard-won progress to academic grade level, his voice breaking as he talked about the choice his family faces.
“‘Just keep him home,’ they say. ‘It’s your problem, not ours.’ Is that community?” he said, noting that his son would be at-risk in a classroom, and lose his academic progress. He added he doesn’t have the answer but appealed to the community to remember to do the moral thing. “Sometimes we have to do the right thing, even if it makes some people unhappy.”
“I don’t trust masks, vaccines or governments,” said Zeeland resident Brian VanDussen who noted he’d had COVID earlier this year, but avoided passing it along to his wife or their four children. “We’re tired of the mandates, whether masks or vaccines. We’re tired of being shamed because we want a choice,” he said. “We’re tired of feeling guilty because we’re so-called ‘selfish.'”
His words, including when he referred to COVID-19 as “the China virus,” drew cheers from the anti-mask crowd in the lobby.
People advocating for masks and other preventative measures indicated they felt intimidated by the crowd in the lobby and in some cases asked for an escort through the group.
Hospitals in Michigan are currently at 76 percent capacity, statewide. Two report being at 100 percent capacity; more than a dozen individual hospitals show more than 90 percent of their beds are occupied. Dr. Rob Davidson, who works at a West Michigan hospital emergency room, said during the last major COVID surge, his hospital had to send some patients to other hospitals, an hour or more away, because there were no more beds available.
Being on the front lines, he said, gave him a front-row view of the effects of surges — from transferring patients to hospitals as far away as Hastings to having patients waiting for up to 24 hours in an emergency room bed to be transferred to a hospital with a bed or discharged. He said his hospital doesn’t treat children, but that the delta variant is proving to attack younger people more aggressively.
Should the virus surge again, he said, “We can do it again. I don’t know if the system can do it again.”
He cited the loss of emergency responders, saying six EMTs serving his rural hospital quit their jobs since the pandemic started, exhausted by 24-hour shifts; nurses who left their jobs, also drained by the demands and emotional cost of the pandemic.
“We have a simple means, a simple mask. It’s not 100 percent, but it’s not zero percent, either. It does have an effect. It will save a few kids’ lives,” he said.
Many other speakers rose to the microphone, in some cases making statements which were medically inaccurate. Some continued talking beyond the 2-minute limit, despite county officials asking them to allow the next person to speak. Many read pre-written statements from digital devices, expressing concerns that children would be harmed physically or unable to learn while wearing masks. Others urged county officials to do more to promote public-health education, aides to classrooms to help with mask compliance and to find measure of compromise for those with medical issues that prevented proper mask use. At least one man, his voice dripping with sarcasm, called the commissioners “petty tyrants” and promoted a group formed to press elected officials into signing pledges that recognize the “nation’s Judeo-Christian heritage and celebrate America as an exceptional nation blessed by God. We stand united to restore and amplify the principles of American exceptionalism.” The online text suggests that those who sign the pledge will get support in the 2022 primary and general elections.
The commissioners are feeling the effects of the local decision. Commissioner Greg J. DeJong said he wished state lawmakers would have made the mask decision, and said he and other commissioners are getting blasted by area residents. He asked if county officials would be sent into schools to enforce mask compliance.
He said he has “so much respect” for the health department, but felt betrayed by the health officials’ decision to issue the Pre-K through 12 mask mandate.
He appealed for some kind of mandate compromise and suggested he would vote against funding 17 jobs in the health department dedicated to administering COVID tests and collecting data.
Ottawa County’s outgoing executive director, Al Vandenberg, said the county does not have “excess staff,” even before last week’s mask mandate, “and now it’s even worse.”
DeJong recounted getting a phone call from a resident who he said told him that if he supported the mask mandate, she’d hoped he’d “burn in hell,” he said. “My stomach’s been in knots for four days. Like most of my colleagues here that I like and respect. I’m just, mad as a hornet that we’re in this position.”
He said “hundreds of people” had been complaining to the commissioners, none of whom made the decision to mandate masks, and acknowledged that he knew health department employees were also hearing angry comments from the public.
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