ROCHELLE — Gov. JB Pritzker announced at a Thursday news conference that masks will be required indoors statewide regardless of vaccination status beginning Monday amid the ongoing surge in the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Pritzker also announced that employees in schools and healthcare settings will be required to receive the COVID-19 vaccine starting Sept. 5. Those who are unwilling or unable will be required to get tested for COVID-19 at least once a week. 

Rochelle Mayor John Bearrows and Ogle County Health Department Public Administrator Kyle Auman took to Facebook Thursday in a video reacting to the changes. 

“We must slow down and stop this spread,” Bearrows said. “This mask mandate worked before. As your mayor, I’m asking you to pitch in and make this work again. It’s not the end of the world. This is something we have to do for eachother.”

There are no other mitigations currently in place for local businesses besides indoor masking and social distancing. The City of Rochelle has put multiple programs in place to help its businesses with pandemic-related losses since March 2020. 

“The Delta variant spreads like wildfire and we have to slow this up,” Bearrows said. “If we don’t, then we could certainly see changes down the road that we don’t like. As mayor of your city, I can tell you we pumped a lot of money into businesses during the last COVID-19 round. And I don’t know if we can afford to do that again.”

Auman said the OCHD has seen an upswing in cases over the last couple of weeks. Over the summer it saw 0-2 cases a day. Now it’s seeing over 20 cases a day. The positivity rate in Ogle County Thursday was 6.4 percent. 

The OCHD is currently working on five separate COVID-19 outbreaks and well over 100 active cases. 

“We’ve seen a shift in August in the 21-30-year-old population that was driving our case counts,” Auman said. “Just in August, our predominant cases are in the 6-15-year-olds. Younger folks are absolutely spreading the virus. That’s our school population. Luckily the mask mandate was put into place. I think we’d be in a lot more difficult of a situation if we didn’t have those mitigations currently in place.”

Auman said hospital bed and ICU availability in the past 10 days has dropped four percent. 

“Please be reasonable in your actions,” Auman said. “This is a public health issue. It’s called that for a reason. We need the public’s help to address this issue.”

Bearrows praised Rochelle Community Hospital leadership and staff for their work during the pandemic. 

“We’re very fortunate in a town of 9,500 to have that hospital,” Bearrows said. “Let’s not abuse it. Let’s do our best to slow this thing up. How we get through it is up to us. This can be a bump in the road or an absolute roadblock. Our city, county and our state can’t afford another roadblock.”