Jackson County's public health system 'overwhelmed' by COVID-19 cases as pause begins

The two-week pause on certain activities, mandated by Governor Brown and state health officials, began on Wednesday.

Recovering after they county public health about the county is pivoting to handle the increase in cases here in jackson county.

So we are in the process of doing some triage and we actually just got guidance an hour ago from the state to help us and other counties, uh, to, to manage the workload in a more efficient way.

So that means we're going to continue to focus aggressively on the highest risk.

Uh, individuals in our population, those living in nursing homes, those who are already at high risk, those who work with those in those categories.

And it may mean that.

Uh, other individuals might get contacted later.

Right?

So the first contacts we're going to do are going to try and do you identify those folks at highest risk and what kind of work down the list in a triage line fashion, and perhaps answer fewer questions that are on the questionnaire.

Maybe not make so many phone calls.

So that we can just keep, keep going and reaching out to people as best we can.

So that as a way to warn them, they might be infected to get tested in quarantine.

Or why would you reduce the number of questions and how does that facilitate keeping the rest of the committee safer?

Yeah.

So the county, i mean, the state rather has a number of questions that we ask of everybody.

It's just part of the data collection that they do.

Um, it's, you know, it's helpful in a 20,000 foot view area, uh, in terms of getting people notified that they've got covid and figure out who their contacts were, those questions just take extra time.

They're useful.

We don't have the luxury of that right now.

So we're going to have to try and reduce the amount of time on the phone with any, any particular individual so we can move on to the next person.

And the state stay