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ST. LOUIS — St. Louis County Executive Sam Page announced a series of new restrictions and programs Monday aimed at curbing rising COVID-19 numbers, including a 50-person event limit, new occupancy rules for businesses and closure of bars after 10 p.m. 

Page listed seven new rules and programs in a that the county executive described as a four-week rollback of some reopening measures after the county has seen record-breaking highs of new COVID-19 cases this week.

• The county will limit gatherings and events to no more than 50 people beginning Friday at 5 p.m. At the end of June, the county lifted its 10-person event limit to allow gatherings to be limited based on fire code occupancy limits.  

• Business occupancy limits will be rolled back to 25%, down from the previous limit of 50% set June 29. That limit would apply to churches, spokesman Doug Moore said Monday. 

• All late-night service at bars after 10 p.m. will be closed starting Friday. 

• The county will create a process for closing businesses not following COVID-19 requirements. 

• All those waiting for COVID-19 test results will be told to quarantine until they get their results. Page said some in the county have had to wait 5 to 7 days for test results, and in some cases longer. Between about 6% to 8% of people getting tested in the county are testing positive, Page said. 

• The county will be requiring all health care providers to report COVID-19 test results to the county health department promptly. Page said some providers, particularly urgent care centers, have lagged in reporting making it more difficult to identify and control outbreaks. 

• The county will provide teachers with places to quarantine when schools reopen this fall. “This fall they're going to be on the front lines," Page said.

Page mentioned multiple times in the news conference that he thought the school year in the county would begin with all-virtual instruction, and that students could hopefully return to in-person education later in the fall. Asked if Page would be overruling the schools that have already announced that they would start school as normal, the county spokesman Moore said that county officials believe that schools would make the decision to go all-virtual based on the coronavirus infection statistics.

Page said he does not expect the trajectory of infections to be affected by the new restrictions for at least three weeks, due to the latency period of the disease.

“The rate of rise that we see today will be much worse before it gets better,� he said.

St. Louis County has had by-far the most COVID-19 cases and deaths of any county in the state, by Monday totaling 11,507 known cases and 636 deaths since the start of the pandemic. The county accounts for about 27% of the state's cases and more than half of the deaths, but makes up less than one sixth of the state's population. 

Page said Monday that the county is seeing an increasing number of cases in people in their teens and 20s, adding that "contact tracing, social media and common sense" have indicated bars and late-night venues are a concern for spread of the virus because crowds have not been following mask and social distancing rules. 

The St. Louis region hit a metric over the weekend that Page had set as a threshold to prompt new restrictions: The 7-day average for new COVID-19 hospital admissions at 40.

The region hit that average starting Saturday, up from 14 in mid-June, according to the St. Louis Metropolitan Pandemic Task Force, a coalition of the region's major hospital systems, SSM Health, Mercy, BJC HealthCare and St. Luke’s. 

Among those hospitals, there were a total of 240 hospitalized COVID-19 patients according to the most recent data Sunday. Of those, 59 were in intensive care units, and 28 were on ventilators. There also were 97 patients hospitalized with suspected cases of COVID-19.

Hospitalizations have risen since early July, but have not surpassed the peak numbers of more than 750 hospitalized with suspected or confirmed cases in April. 

Statewide, Missouri has reported nearly 42,000 cases of COVID-19, and nearly 1,200 deaths since the start of the pandemic. 

This is a breaking new story. Check back for updates.