Andrew County Health Dept. under serious strain from pandemic

The health department has shut down the office to most normal services with the exception of WIC, to help process the heavy load of growing Covid-19 cases.

The battle against covid-19 is ramping up all over the country, including right here in northwest missouri, good evening i'm jodie o'brien.

One day after a local county reported an over 400-precent increase in cases, they're now urging residents to do everything they can to stay safe from the virus kq2's ron johnson joins us now in studio with more on the toll it's taken on the local health department, ron jodie, staff at rural health departments in our area have been warning us of the strain this virus is putting on them.

Keep in mind, andrew county is one of several rural counties that ádo notá have mask mandates.

And now they're sounding the alarm...loudly.

<<ron johnson reporting in andrew county, the local health department ramping up its response to covid-19 we're now under emergency operations the virus now so prevalent in the county that the health department is suspending almost all other services to focus solely on covid related tasks.

It's a heavy workload for the rural health department it's really hard for us local health departments to keep up with all the activity that needs to happen.

Cases in the county they say have been on a steady rise for months it actually started towards the end of august and it's been a pretty good rise since.the latest numbers show andrew county with 473 active cases of covid-19, 877 cases overall and 12 deaths.they're numbers that trend upward by the day according to the health department, and they want people to understand how important it is to take this seriously.if you're not well you need to stay home we see young healthy people knocked down by this saying it's the worst thing they've ever experienced.and then we have people that when we're doing our follow up calls with them to check up on them, we're having to call ambulances for them to take them to the hospital.

As area hospitals are either full or filling up fast, they're urging county residents to do their part to slow the spread.

We don't want to scare people, that's not the point of this.

The point of this is to do what you can to protect those around you that may be more susceptible than you are.>> the andrew county health department says it's up to city and county commisioners to make the call on issuing mask mandates.

They are still providing wic services to their residents.

Live in the studio ron johnson kq2 news.