Health board meets as coronavirus cases jump

As coronavirus cases surged ever upward this month, members of the Lincoln County Health Board amplified calls for residents to join in common cause against the pandemic’s worsening spread.

The board did not add any additional restrictions to Health Officer Dr. Brad Black’s July order during its Nov. 10 meeting, but did outline new efforts to more closely coordinate the pandemic response among county and municipal officials. The board met as active cases increased to 168, up 43 that day alone, owing in part to an outbreak at an alternative school in the Yaak.

“I think there have been some voids and some vacuums that can give people the impression that there is some information purposefully not being shared,” said County Commissioner Mark Peck (D-1), who sits on the health board.

“I disagree with that premise,” he said. “There is no question we need to be better at what we’re doing as a board, as a commission, even as a health department, but that doesn’t mean that people are not trying to do the best they can here.”

Peck said he had met extensively with members of the local medical community and area elected leaders in the preceding days in the hopes of presenting a united front against the coronavirus. He said that discussions with Mayor Brent Teske of Libby and Mayor Dallas Carr of Troy had borne fruit.

“As a community, we’ve got to try to come together better,” Peck said. “I think you’re going to see a lot more information from elected officials and more consistent messaging from the health board.”

A new website for the county health department is in the works as well, said Director Kathi Hooper. It will allow staff to post daily updates and other statistics without relying upon Facebook. They plan to include links to resources and provide information to the public on what to do if you need to get tested for the coronavirus or develop symptoms of COVID-19.

Black, who also was in attendance in the Ponderosa Room of Libby City Hall, welcomed the outreach. The pandemic had reached what he described as a “critical point” in Lincoln County and the surrounding region.

The health officer pointed to the lack of hospital beds in Kalispell, where local COVID-19 patients have been transferred to for more specialized care, and the spread of cases among residents at the Libby Care Center.

“It’s never too late to try to turn this around,” Black said. “I think we can do it, but we’ve got to care about each other. It’s time we quit bickering; quit taking shots. Let’s think about how we take care of people.”

Black said the next few months presented the real challenge. News of a possible vaccine represented the light at the end of the tunnel, he said. Residents needed to join with medical experts to tamp down the virus spread through the winter.

“There are things on the horizon; we won’t do this for the rest of our lives,” Black said, referencing pandemic restrictions. “I’m just really pleased to have everybody working together on this.”

Board members briefly debated the severity of the situation after Debra Armstrong, the Eureka representative to the group, asked for an assessment of the threat the coronavirus posed to the majority of the county’s population. She told the board that the people she knew who had contracted the virus took ill, but recovered.

“It’s certainly not pleasant, but not worse than anything they’ve been through so far,” Armstrong said.

Black said the risk was higher for older patients. He likened someone his age catching the virus to playing Russian roulette with a 10-chambered revolver. Black pointed as well to research that the viral load a person receives plays a role in the severity of symptoms in an attempt to address the question regarding younger and healthier individuals.

On the whole, the virus was unlike anything he had experienced.

“The mortality rate with coronavirus is something we’ve never seen,” Black said. “Dr. [Greg] Rice and I have been in medicine for 50 years each and we’ve never seen any virus do what this does. It’s very deadly.”

Black reiterated a point he has made since the early days of the pandemic: When the virus spreads out of control in a given area, it overloads the health care system. In El Paso, Texas, for example, local officials have been forced to bring in mobile morgues to handle the mortalities. State officials summoned more than 1,000 extra personnel to aid area hospitals as medical workers suffer burnout from the workload. New York City was similarly overwhelmed earlier in the year.

“Our goal is not to find out how many deaths we can get to, it’s to prevent that from happening,” Black said, taking aim at critics of pandemic response measures that cite what they see as the low number of fatalities. Lincoln County has seen six deaths thus far out of 475 known cases.

Armstrong also questioned if the medical community locally was overstretched. She said that the number of hospitalizations for COVID-19 in Lincoln County hovered around two patients at any given time. If COVID-19 patients were sent to Kalispell for treatment and plenty of beds remained free in Lincoln County, it did not seem as though there was a problem, she said.

Armstrong’s colleagues on the board, Dr. Sara Mertes and Laura Crismore of Cabinet Peaks Medical Center, pushed back against her assessment. Crismore described the medical center’s agreement with facilities in Kalispell as situational. If they lack the space, then coronavirus patients would need treatment in Libby, she said.

Mertes argued that the virus already had strained personnel in the county. Health workers who test positive are sidelined, putting additional pressure on remaining personnel.

“That’s the other side of the coin,” Mertes said. “We’re looking potentially at staffing shortages.”

Armstrong countered by arguing that area medical facilities added to the problem by sending home staff that appear or feel sick.

Dr. Kelli Jarrett, who spoke during the public comment portion of the meeting, lent support to Mertes and Crismore. As of that evening, nearly a quarter of the patients in Kalispell Regional Medical Center suffered from COVID-19, she said. The facility had just three more beds left in its COVID-19 ward. At Kootenai Health in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, they had a 32-bed COVID-19 unit and 44 COVID-19 patients, she said.

“I just want to make it very clear that our hospital is not full and overflowing [because] every COVID patient we get we are trying to fly out, because right now we do not have the best capacity to care for that patient,” Jarrett said. “I’m not trying to paint a dire picture, but this is not influenza.”

At least one local store owner attended the meeting, which was held in the Ponderosa Room as opposed to the county commissioner’s meeting room to allow for an audience and social distancing, out of concern the board planned to close down nonessential businesses. Board members said they had no intention of enacting further restrictions on area businesses.

Several Libby businesses had closed in recent days owing to the spread of the virus.

Chair Jan Ivers acknowledged that the situation was confusing for local merchants, especially given the range in reactions from officials across the state. In nearby Kalispell, officials have approached the pandemic differently, she said.

“The main concern of board of health is public health,” Ivers said. “And we don’t want to see this virus ruin our community and take those people we love.”