Glencoe Cafe Staff Take Two Coronavirus Tests Before Reopening

GLENCOE, IL — After a staffer at a Glencoe coffee shop tested positive for the coronavirus last week, its owners decided to go beyond the minimum recommendations of public health officials.

Julie and Lou Rubin, the married longtime village residents who opened Hometown Coffee & Juice in 2018 at the southwest corner of Vernon and Park avenues, responded to the positive result by implementing a COVID-19 testing protocol stricter than the one imposed by most other businesses, nonprofits and local schools — even private ones.

Management learned that an employee tested positive on Wednesday, according to co-owner Lou Rubin. The next day, he and his wife announced it would close for a full week to ensure no one else had contracted the virus.

"We anticipated this would happen eventually and just knew we had to get it right," Rubin told Patch. "We have really earned some goodwill and trust with this community, and you have to get this right. You just have no choice."

Following a cleaning, representatives of the Cook County Health Department gave Hometown Coffee clearance to reopen the next day. But its owners decided to keep the doors closed for another week out of an abundance of caution, Rubin explained.

"I decided I wasn't comfortable," he said. "Even though I'm clear to open, I decided to voluntarily close and say, 'OK, let's get a handle on it, let's test everybody."

When the operator of a bar or restaurant learns an employee tests positive for coronavirus, they are required to notify their local health department, thoroughly clean their establishment and quarantine anyone who had been within 6 feet of the person who tested positive for 15 minutes or longer, according to state guidelines.

But there are no requirements for restaurants to test staff or notify the public, two things the Hometown Coffee owners decided to do. As a result, most public-facing businesses have been able to avoid ever having to close their doors to patrons when their workers contract COVID-19.

"If you have someone that's positive and you don't know if anyone else gave it to that person. Yes, you can separate the people that weren't within a small distance but how do we know? You don't know. As we all struggle with this, whether you're in a school or a restaurant or a home," he said. "Yes, there's these rules, but when you really think about it deeply, this is an environment that I just didn't want to take any risks."

The interior of the cafe and juicery has been closed to the public since the start of the pandemic. Its owner said staff began wearing masks before they became required, and windows have been kept open to maximize ventilation.

Rubin said he paid for two rounds of tests for all employees at a private lab in order to get results as fast as possible. The first tests were conducted Thursday and returned results over the weekend. He said the results of the second round of tests, which were timed to ensure any case that developed after exposure to the infected employee would be detected, were received Tuesday, clearing the cafe to open Wednesday.

"Given the fact that I work here, I'm 53 years old, I want to protect myself, and our customers, and our employees and everybody who comes through here," Rubin said. "I take that responsibility very seriously, as witnessed by this last week."

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Comprehensive coronavirus testing strategies — where everyone is tested regardless of symptoms — have been credited with identifying asymptomatic carriers and preventing them from spreading the virus.

The University of Illinois is testing its approximately 40,000 students and staff twice every week. State public health officials began encouraging the testing of nursing home staff, regardless as symptoms, after hundreds of elderly residents began dying in the early months of the outbreak.

But it does cost money. While many professional athletes and workers in the finance sector have been getting tested for the virus every week or two, no area schools have publicly announced such a strategy. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not recommend universal testing of students and staff, citing a lack of systematic studies and practical concerns about implementation.

But the CDC does recommend testing of all asymptomatic people who had close contacts with a confirmed COVID-19 case. And it also acknowledges the value of testing workers who have not, according to a guidance document for non-health care businesses.

"Viral testing of workers without symptoms may be useful to detect COVID-19 early and stop transmission quickly," it said, "particularly in areas with moderate to substantial community transmission."

In Glencoe, there only have been 75 confirmed cases of COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, according to the Cook County Department of Public Health. Data from the Cook County Medical Examiner's Office shows the first village resident to suffer fatal complications from the disease, a man in his 60s, died earlier this month.

In addition to covering the cost of the tests, Rubin said he also fully paid each of the cafe's employees who had been scheduled to work on days the shop was closed.

"The reality is that restaurant people work in a risky world right now," he said. "It's very overwhelming sometimes to know that you're responsible for so many people."