Fresh faces, fewer tools: Meet the new bosses fighting COVID

Emilie Sayler’s roots run deep in southwestern Montana. She serves on a nearby town council and the board of the local Little League. She went to college in a neighboring county and regularly volunteers in the schools of her three kids.

Just a few months into her new job as public health director for Madison County, she had hoped that those local connections might make a difference, that the fewer than 10,000 residents spread out across this agricultural region would see her familiar face and support her efforts to curtail the coronavirus pandemic raging here.

That largely hasn’t happened. School boards have rebuffed even minor measures to prevent outbreaks, vaccination rates languish and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention categorizes infection levels in the rural county as high. Parents, Sayler said, are sending sick kids to school.