UPDATED WITH VIDEO: PB council to review request for city mask requirement

A local physician and hospital official called Monday on Poplar Bluff City Council members to enact a mandatory mask ordinance.

City officials said after the meeting they will take the request under advisement.

Poplar Bluff Regional Medical Center has faced a full COVID-19 unit for the past three months, having to go as far at times as Tulsa, Oklahoma, Belleville, Illinois, and Harrisonville, Arkansas, to find free beds to treat patients, said Dr. Donald Piland, a member of PBRMC’s Board of Directors.

It has faced the loss of nursing and respiratory therapists to facilities that can pay as much as $175 per hour for staff.

And it has watched a husband and wife die within a week of each other from COVID-19, a healthy 26-year-old fight for his life on a ventilator and a retired pharmacist and co-caregiver for a special needs individual lose his life to the illness.

“We desperately need our city council to be proactive and enact a mandatory mask ordinance much like (29 states and) … the 19 Missouri communities that have already done, if only for three months to help us get through the flu season and into the time we can all get vaccinated,” said Piland, who has practiced internal medicine in Poplar Bluff for 37 years.

He provided a list of the communities who have taken the step, including Springfield, Joplin, Kansas City, St. Louis, Columbia, Branson and Rolla, as well as several Missouri counties, and the state of Arkansas.

“While masks are not perfect, they’ve been shown scientifically that they help minimize the spread not only of COVID-19 but also influenza,” Piland said in a five-minute speech during the city council meeting’s public comment period. “Masks have recently been shown to increase the likelihood that the wearer will have a less severe case of COVID-19, decreasing the number of inhaled viral particles.”

Mask use has helped decrease the personal and economic cost in countries such as Australia, Iceland and Japan, Piland said.

“They worked to help contain the Spanish flu in 1918. They helped our school district recently to control their COVID problem. They helped New York city when a stay home mandatory order wasn’t actually working,” he said.

Piland said he had heard rumors that some community leaders were basing their opinions about mask wearing on the belief that masks don’t help, that the disease is no worse than the flu, that COVID-19 is a hoax and that masks will make the wearer sick.

“These ideas are not obviously supported by the medical or scientific community and are all examples of internet misinformation and only serve to stand in the way of our community’s health and safety,” he said. “I don’t need to remind you that government leaders have a responsibility to protect the health and safety of the citizens that we serve.”

He also reminded the council of the adage, those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

“We lost 670,000 Americans due to the Spanish flu over three years’ time,” he said. “We’re almost halfway there in a little over a quarter of the time with COVID-19.”

Piland provided council members with a list of 32 references that he said speak to the effectiveness of masks in protecting against COVID-19. These included publications from the CDC, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, American Lung Association, Mayo Clinic, World Health Organization and other organizations.