Under Indiana’s stay-at-home order, Brown County State Park and Yellowwood State Forest are allowed to stay open, with some restrictions.

So are short-term rental properties, like hotels and motels, and restaurants that offer carry-out food and beverages.

The state’s rules about “essential” and “non-essential” businesses and travel — now extended until April 20 — have left local leaders wondering about tourism during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Is Brown County “open” to visitors?

And should it be?

“The CVB is not telling anyone anything,” said Jane Ellis, executive director of the Brown County Convention and Visitors Bureau, during the March 25 meeting of COAD, Community Organizations Active in a Disaster.

She said she’d been having weekly phone calls with the Indiana Department of Tourism Development and the lieutenant governor’s office about tourism and the pandemic.

The message and advice keep changing, she said.

“We’re emailing visitors once a week just with a message, whatever seems appropriate at the time — not ‘come visit,’ just whatever,” Ellis said April 3.

Today, the message was mostly about online stores and virtual activities.

“The big challenge we have is that people want to come to Brown County and escape,” she said at the COAD meeting.

That’s a concern for local emergency management officials.

Brown County had three confirmed cases of the virus as of April 3.

“I am absolutely convinced that if tourists and people are allowed to shelter in place and hunker down in guest cabins, that they will absolutely increase the numbers we have of sick people and deplete what little resources we do have,” said Dr. Norman Oestrike, Brown County’s health officer.

Brown County has one grocery store, one pharmacy, three gas stations, all-volunteer firefighters, two EMS trucks and no hospital, Public Health Preparedness Coordinator Corey Frost pointed out.

“My opinion, we are a rural county, and we need to do everything we can to protect our residents,” Oestrike said. “… There are other areas of the country that have shifted to tremendous hot spots of this disease from visitors, visitors who want to quarantine and hang out in the rental properties, the resorts, the beaches. Our demographics are such that we have a lot of older folks who are particularly vulnerable, but we have very limited resources, and if visitors come in large numbers, they expose everyone.

“Anyone who comes to this county can be healthy and spread the disease,” he said. “And the World Health Organization, the CDC, the Indiana State Department of Health and yours truly, your local health officer, absolutely believe that we have to stop travel and shelter at home. And home is not a tourist or guest home.”

Oestrike also has concern about people visiting state parks — something that state officials have encouraged for exercise.

People should not be day-tripping to state parks, Gov. Eric Holcomb clarified during a press conference on April 2.

“Most of them are spread out around the state to where, hopefully, they’re closest to home where you have access. We’re not encouraging people to take day trips and make multiple stops to go out and exercise,” Holcomb said.

“… If you live close to state parks, those are ideal places to go in and take deep breaths, contemplate and reflect and get some exercise in.”

But so is walking around your own neighborhood, he added.

Visitors from all over are still coming here, Oestrike said.

“I can tell you that my level tour of the county, maybe last Sunday or Saturday, the Abe Martin Lodge was closed, the campground was not closed, the mountain bike pathways were open, and people on mountain bikes were congregating everyplace, license plates from all over the state and neighboring states, and they were not social distancing,” he said.

“The thing that bothers me the most about this is that all those people heading for outdoor activities are using the bathroom somewhere,” wrote Amy Vasquez Badgett on the Brown County Democrat’s Facebook page. “They are stopping for gas. They are getting something to eat. They are hitting up the petting zoo. They are stopping in stores just to look around (even just the gas station). All because they are bored, people are being put at risk.

“Recreational travel is the single most entitled thing one could do right now,” she added.

Communities across the country that are markets for vacationers and second homeowners, like Florida, have taken to checking the IDs of travelers and requiring them to self-isolate if they come from “areas of substantial community spread,” according to the Florida Department of Transportation.

Brown County has not issued any travel advisory, watch or warning related to COVID-19. Twenty-nine of Indiana’s 92 counties had issued some level of advisory as of April 2.

Local emergency management officials are discussing such things daily, Frost said. They can issue an advisory or a watch without the approval of the county commissioners; a warning would require that.

The logistics of travel restrictions could be tricky, though, with three state highways running through Brown County.

“I don’t think we can stop people from traveling through, but if they’re going to hunker down here, if they’re going to use our EMS personnel when they get sick, use our grocery stores, I don’t think that’s right or fair,” Oestrike said.

Under Holcomb’s stay-at-home order, rentals for lodging are essential businesses, said Amy Howell, director of communications and media relations for the Indiana Office of Tourism Development.

“Unless you work for an essential business or are doing an essential activity, you must stay home,” she said. But also, “People are allowed to travel to a place they feel safe.”

Up until last week, Hills O’Brown Vacation Rentals was still receiving calls for rental cabins in Brown County, said Patty Frensemeier, general manager.

“We’re not sure how we feel about that,” she told COAD at the March 25 meeting. Just the day before, she’d received eight calls seeking cabin rentals for the next day, she said.

“Their kids are stressed. We hear that a lot,” she said about callers’ reasons for wanting to come.

By the next COAD meeting March 30, Frensemeier said that bookings had slowed to the point where “tourist homes are pretty much nonexistent,” and so was business at local hotels. “All that business is pretty much halted,” she said.

The Brown County Convention and Visitors Bureau tells potential visitors on its website that “all major area events have been impacted” due to advisories about gatherings of 50 or more people, and advises them to “contact any event venue or attraction before visiting.”

On April 3, the agency sent out an email encouraging readers to “experience Brown County virtually or come spend a day in the great outdoors with us,” and gave links to online stores, virtual tours and activities that local businesses are hosting, as well as an invitation to “hit the trails” with reminders about social distancing and playground closures.

The Nashville Town Council briefly discussed on March 31 what message it might send about COVID-19. Council President Jane Gore issued an order in late March to close public restrooms downtown, since most shops are closed.

If any “nonessential” businesses as defined in the governor’s order are open, they shouldn’t be, in order to protect people from possible spread of the virus, Gore said. “I think most shops have voluntarily closed. That’s what I’d like to encourage, voluntarily.”

Council member Nancy Crocker encouraged people to support local restaurants by getting carry-out, and to support local stores by mail order.

Oestrike said he’d received one report of a “nonessential” business that was still operating in the county. To enforce the governor’s orders, they’d have to call the state police, and they hadn’t done that yet, he said on April 3. He was hoping that “education and compliance and peer pressure” would work, “to make these people understand that this is deadly.”

State and federal resources are available for business owners that think they have to keep operating just to pay the bills or feed their family, he said.

“Nobody wants to hurt a business in Brown County or anywhere else, but conversely, if they are the cause of infection in our county, and the causes of deaths … just so they can make a buck, personally, I think that’s wrong,” he said.

“I want everybody to be successful, but I want everybody to be alive at the end of this.”