A Coronavirus Question At Lake Of The Ozarks: If A Second-Homeowner Gets Sick, Where Is It Counted?

Whether it’s because we’ve all discovered a latent love for statistics or we’re just craving as much information as we can about the perplexing and frustratingly-still-novel coronavirus, Americans have been rattling off more numbers, figures, percentages, and probabilities in the past month than they ever did in high school and college combined.

At Lake of the Ozarks' three main counties—Camden, Miller, and Morgan, there have been a total of 39 confirmed cases of Covid-19 since testing began in March with one Covid-related death: seemingly not a mass outbreak. Meanwhile, droves of people from Midwest cities have retreated to their Lake homes to ride out the coronavirus storm. So some have been asking: if a person from another city is diagnosed with Covid-19 while they’re staying at their Lake house, does it count as a local case or is it tallied toward the cases in their home county? And what if they test positive here at the Lake but then seek treatment back home, or elsewhere?

It’s an important question, since the Lake is a second-home for far more people than it is a first-home: so if second-homeowners’ positive cases were counted toward the Lake of the Ozarks area’s total, it could make the number of cases at the Lake seem outsized compared to the population.

Camden County Health Department Administrator Bee Dampier says there is a system to attributing Covid-19 positive cases to specific regions: “Jurisdiction falls to whatever address is given by the patient,” Dampier said. “If they list their KC address when they go in for testing, it goes to KC. If they list their Camden [County] address it comes to me. If they test positive here and give a Camden address, we would follow up no matter what hospital they went to.”

Dampier told LakeExpo in a previous interview that the “mobility of our county” likely played a part in the initial burst of infections just after St. Patrick’s Day weekend. “Remember the weather was nice, St Pat's weekend, lots of people were out and about. Back yard barbecues and other things we love to do with our friends and families brought people in close contact,” she said. “I think certainly just the mobility of our county played a big part in it. No one was staying home that weekend, and most had several people they were in close contact with.”

Dampier added, “We were just living the life we love, no one intended to make any one ill.” She said she was encouraged by the decline in the number of new cases in Camden County, and the county was “as ready as we can be” to reopen.