The Berrien County Health Department is looking to the future as it works to prevent and mitigate the COVID-19 epidemic locally. Health officer Nicki Britten told the Berrien County Board of Commissioners on Thursday this situation is far from over.
“Some of the collateral damage from our response to the pandemic, how we can minimize that with the health needs of our residents in the years going forward,” Britten said. “We know there will be an impact for a long time to come, and we’re doing that planning now.”
Board Chair Mac Elliott asked Britten if the state has talked about a regional approach to COVID-19, knowing the situation is different outside of the Detroit area. Britten said she hasn’t heard anything, but it would make sense.
“Health officers across the state, myself included, would be in support of a regionalized approach, depending on what that looks like and how we define regions. Some of that would depend a lot on contiguous counties having some amount of agreement as to what we need in place.”
Britten said as things stand right now, she expects Berrien County cases of the illness to go substantially up due to more testing, adding mild cases are now also getting tested. Most are run by Spectrum Health Lakeland, which is keeping up with the roughly 20 to 30% of COVID patients who need to be hospitalized.
“The hospital is not anywhere near their capacity, so we’re not into even the surge plan yet. So that’s really great.”
Britten said the health department is working daily with a Benton Harbor nursing home where a cluster of COVID-19 has been identified. A big challenge for Hallmark Living has been getting PPE and managing staffing. Britten noted it’s been similar with other nursing homes around the state.
