The Berrien County Health Department is closely monitoring the county’s 40 confirmed COVID-19 cases, and tracking a lot of potential contacts. County Health Officer Nicki Britten told the Berrien County Board of Commissioners during Thursday’s virtual meeting there’s been a great deal going on behind the scenes.
“We are doing contact tracing on all of the positive cases and then any of their contacts that are symptomatic,” Britten said. “We’re then doing contact tracing for them and following that out. We have over 700 people who we have gone through this contact tracing. Most of them are getting daily phone calls during a 14 day period.”
Britten said suspected cases and confirmed cases are either in treatment or self-isolating. The health department has been talking to the county’s attorney about what to do in cases where someone can’t self-isolate. For example, the homeless.
“We’re working to line up some facilities that if we have to order somebody into isolation and quarantine a bit more forcefully, that we have those facilities available.”
One problem has been the scarcity of personal protective equipment.
“We received a small amount from the strategic national stockpile about two or three weeks ago. It was a very small amount, and we’ve now been told that’s pretty much the end of what we might be getting from SNS. We should not expect more in that regard.”
Britten was asked if the county and Spectrum Health Lakeland are considering the possibility of using county property for field hospitals in case Spectrum Health Lakeland gets overrun. She said the logistics on something like that would be a major challenge. Instead, they’re talking about taking over hotels in a worst case scenario. Britten stressed the need for social distancing, saying the goal is to stop each new cases of coronavirus from leading to more cases.
