The Jefferson County Health Department Board of Trustees has scheduled a special meeting to discuss COVID-19.
The meeting is set for 6 p.m. Thursday (Oct. 15), when Health Department Director Kelley Vollmar is expected to go over feedback from her recent meeting with community members about how curb the spread of the virus.
The meeting will be held at the Hillsboro Community Civic Club, 10349 Business 21, to allow more members of the public to attend. However, the meeting will be limited to 75 people, the Health Department reported today (Oct. 8).
Those who attend must wear a solid cloth face mask.
Public comments will be allowed at the meeting, but each person will be limited to five minutes per comment, unless a large number of people want to comment, and then the time may be limited to 3 minutes for each speaker, according to the Health Department.
The meeting will be livestreamed, and people may attend the meeting via the Zoom videoconference app.
Vollmar met Tuesday (Oct. 6) with county officials, state reps, school district leaders and others to get advice about developing a plan to mitigate the virus, and the group recommended against a mask mandate or limiting the size of gatherings.
Instead the consensus among the group members was to try to better communicate the message about the importance of taking preventive steps to limit the spread of the virus, including avoiding crowds, social distancing, wearing masks and hand-washing.
After the meeting, Vollmar said she would draw up a plan for a new messaging campaign and present it to the agency’s Board of Trustees.
The board is scheduled to hold its next regular meeting at 3 p.m. Thursday (Oct. 22) at the Health Department’s Hillsboro office. However, that meeting is for regular business and no discussion of COVID-19 is expected.
County Covid-19 stats
The Health Department announced 47 new COVID-19 cases today (Oct. 8).
That brings the total number of cases in the county to 5,009 since the first ones were reported in March.
Those cases are through midnight Wednesday (Oct. 8).
Of the county’s total coronavirus cases, 622 have been at long-term care facilities, which includes residents and staff members who live in Jefferson County.
The county has had a total of 66 COVID-19-related deaths since the pandemic began.
Of the 66 deaths, 48 have been at long-term care facilities.
The county has had at least 19 COVID-19 outbreaks in long-term care facilities, according to the Health Department.
The Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services (DHSS) defines an outbreak as one or more residents testing positive for the virus or one or more staff members who have worked within a facility in the 14 days before testing positive.
The Health Department reported 3,960 patients have been released from isolation, which means the patients recovered enough to be released from case management.
Brianne Zwiener, the Health Department’s communications specialist, said since Monday (Oct. 5) the Health Department has not posted its usual COVID-19 data graphics to social media, and instead all data is being posted to the agency’s website and COVID-19 dashboard.
Zwiener said the Health Department is working to redesign the dashboard to include more data.
She also said the change will allow the Health Department to have one place for all data and will save staff members some time. The data can be found at jeffcohealth.org/covid19-data.
Color status
The Health Department announced Wednesday (Oct. 7) the county has been moved back into the orange level on the agency’s four-color COVID-19 warning system.
For the previous two weeks, the county had been in the red level, which is the highest level and indicates widespread, uncontrolled community transmission of the virus.
The orange level is the second highest level and indicates widespread but controlled transmission of COVID-19.
The main indicator used to determine the color level is the seven-day rolling average of cases per day per 100,000 residents.
The Health Department reported the county was moved to the orange level based on the number of cases reported from Sept. 27 to Oct. 3, when the rolling average was 22.8 cases per 100,00 residents per day.
When the county, which has a population of about 225,000 people, has a rolling average of 25 or more cases per 100,000 residents per day, it is moved to the red level, which calls for more mitigation to curb the spread of the virus.
The county was in the red level from Aug. 30 to Sept. 5 and again from Sept. 13 to Sept. 26.
The orange level indicates the county is seeing 10 to 24 cases per 100,000 people per day.
According to the Health Department, the seven-day rolling average per 100,000 people per day for the week of Sept. 20-26 was 27.87. The week before that the average was 31.49 per 10,000 people per day.
Health Department staff members have reported that once a week, usually on Tuesday, they review the rolling average number of cases from the previous Sunday through Saturday to see if the county should be moved to a different color on the warning system.
State, U.S. stats
Missouri has had 137,156 positive cases of the coronavirus and 2,259 deaths related to the disease, the DHSS reported today.
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported the U.S. has had 7,528,313 cases, and a total of 211,132 coronavirus-related deaths, as today.
Anyone who shows coronavirus symptoms or who has questions should call the Missouri State Hotline at 877-435-8411 or the Mercy Clinical Support Line at 314-251-0500. For more information about COVID-19, visit jeffcohealth.org/coronavirus-covid19.
