Butler County COVID rate among highest in state

This illustration provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in January 2020 shows the 2019 Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV). This virus was identified as the cause of an outbreak of respiratory illness first detected in Wuhan, China. (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention via AP)

Reducing the transmission of COVID-19 is absolutely the most critical focus right now, Todd Richardson of Poplar Bluff, and director of Missouri Healthnet, told those at Butler County’s weekly COVID-19 briefing Wednesday.

The Butler County numbers remain higher than the state average, Richardson said. Looking at a seven day average case growth, Butler County is sitting at the 12th highest county in the state right now, he said. This is when adjusted for population.

Mitigation efforts to reduce transmission are absolutely critical right now, he said, as well as continuing to reinforce that to the public.

“Every time the governor has done a briefing, he’s talked about mask wearing, social distancing, avoiding large gatherings,” Richardson said. “I know it’s hard to keep people focused on these things, but they are especially important now with the kinds of transmission rates we’re seeing.”

There is no better Christmas gift for the community, than to be diligent about these prevention measures, Richardson said. He also thanked the local members of the COVID response, including front line health care workers and emergency responders for continuing to keep the community safe.

“I’m sure that this road has been longer than many of you anticipated, but you are continuing to be in the fight and continuing to work in making a tremendous difference for the people,” Richardson said.

Missouri is averaging 22,000 new cases per week, he continued, which is double the rate at the first of October.

“It’s an incredibly high rate of disease spread,” Richardson said. “Much, much higher than we would like it to be. We have seen a little bit of a slowing of case growth over the last couple of weeks. Our numbers today are still more than three times what the White House set as the ...red zone threshold.”

“It’s going to be really important for us to continue to monitor over the next several weeks, but also really reduce transmission,” he said.

That case growth is causing a “tremendous stress” on the health care system, he said.

“We’re seeing that stress really manifests itself in two primary areas. First and most directly, it’s the increase in COVID patients that are now occupying Missouri hospitals,” he said. “Our COVID hospitalization numbers are about two and a half times what they were at the beginning of October, and about three and a half times what they were at the spring peak. Hopefully that gives you some sense of the scale of increase we’ve seen over the last month and a half or so.”

Another principal impact on the health care system is through increases in staff who are out because they’re either sick with COVID, or under quarantine or isolation.

“We know the biggest strain on the overall capacity in our health care system is not physical space, it’s not beds, it’s personnel to be able to appropriately staff those beds. And then the last point I’ll make on the current situation is the consequence of all of that case growth,” Richardson said. “The consequence of those increases in hospitalizations, is a growing number of deaths that follow. November was the deadliest month of the pandemic for Missouri. And that’s just the natural and probable consequence of seeing that increased case growth and hospitalizations.”

There are three primary areas to focus on, Richardson said.

“First and foremost is to reduce transmission in our state. Our current levels of transmission and disease spread in the state are not sustainable for our health care system,” he said. “And they’re far higher than what we would like them to be. The second primary area of focus is to continue to support and expand that health care system capacity, and third, on a real positive front is successful rollout of the vaccines, and execution of that vaccine plan.”

Richardson stressed, “We’re also leaning in really hard on our health care system capacity. If you go all the way back to the spring, the state waived a little over 600 regulations to make it easier to provide care in various settings across the state. We distributed as of today, well over 60 million units of personal protective equipment out to various health care partners. We’ve expanded telehealth options, and we continue to use the Missouri National Guard and our Disaster Medical Assistance Team to support health care missions.”

Despite all those efforts, staffing remains a challenge.

The governor announced last week that the state’s partnering with a national staffing agency to bring in what we hope is frontline health care workers that would help support the expansion of about 500 to 600 hospital beds,” Richardson said. “And while it won’t directly impact the hospital in Poplar Bluff, it will certainly impact the rest of the health care system. We believe that if we can augment that capacity statewide, it will have a trickle down effect on how much stress there is and the capacity in the rest of the system.”

The state is really excited about the developments on the vaccine front and the imminent deployment of those vaccines in the state, Richardson said.

“The governor has asked Robert Knodell, a former Butler Countian, to lead the state’s vaccine efforts. We’re excited to have his leadership there. We expect that the FDA will give approval to Pfizer’s vaccine (Thursday), and that we will start to get initial doses shipped into the state next week. It is a very bright light at the end of a very long tunnel,” Richardson said.

Robbie Myers, Butler County Emergency Management director, thanked Richardson.

In her report, Butler County Health Center Director Emily Goodin announced, “We have about 2,903 (total cases); we had 54 new cases (Wednesday). This past Monday, we had about 400 people come through (mass testing). We do have one more mass testing before the holidays are here, before Christmas. That’s next week on Dec. 14, and then we’re going to do one on the Dec. 28.”

Poplar Bluff Regional Medical Center Chief Compliance Officer Johnna Craft said, “We are currently off any diversion house-wide. That means we do have medical beds, critical care beds, and both PCU and ICU. We actually have a couple of COVID beds available. So as everyone knows, that’s not been the state for us in quite some time. So I’m sure we will fill those up quickly. But that is a positive for us today.”

Chris Rushin, executive director of the Boys and Girls Club, said, “We are having a pretty normal week for Boys and Girls Club. We’re still holding it between 300 and 400 kids. I did go back and look at what we were doing this time last year. Our average daily attendance last year in the month of November was 424. It’s affected us by about 40 kids per day and that’s not entirely due to kids being quarantined or anything like that. It’s a matter of dollars and cents. I think it’s well documented how far off our budget is this year, compared to years past. We’re doing everything we can to stay open and we will continue to keep serving the kids.”