Jackson County Public Health investigating two workplace outbreaks

The agency said on Wednesday that it is investigating outbreaks at Knife River Material and Black Bird Shopping Center.

Fauci health to get a better idea of what this means for our local virus trends and reopening progress.

Now, what can you tell us about those workplace outbreaks?

Should we be concerned?

We have workplace workplace outbreaks frequently.

Uh, when they're in small businesses, they don't get reported, uh, to the public, unless there's something of a specific concern.

So, uh, having a couple of new outbreaks is not unusual for us.

Obviously we'd like to see those bees zero, but, um, no, they're not, they're not terribly large.

And i don't see this as a trend in, in particular.

Well, while you mentioned trends, what are you seeing in terms of our case numbers?

Has it been fairly steady or are we seeing some erratic numbers out there?

The numbers, the numbers are not entirely stable.

For example, we've.

Uh, i think we had about 40 some odd cases last few days.

And then prior to that, we were in the single digits.

So we have to sort of see how these numbers play out.

One of the things that happens with an outbreak is you end up doing a lot of investigations and you find cases.

So that may be why are.

You know, our numbers are up a little bit over the last couple of days in general.

If you look back over the last two or three weeks, we have been trending downward and we are last, last time we put all the numbers together.

We were fairly far below the extreme.

Level.

Uh, so we're solidly in the high-risk category.

You mentioned something interesting that when you see an outbreak, you wouldn't do more testing.

Does that mean those lower numbers don't necessarily indicate the true level of virus in the community?

Or is this where you just haven't found the folks that may have been affected by the smaller totally.

Well, that's always true.

I mean, we, you know, we're, we're only testing.

Uh, probably a small percentage of the people that truly have the virus either cause they are symptomatic or they don't want to talk to us or they have mild symptoms or what have you.

The other thing is that the data will fluctuate in part because of what gets reported back from the state.

Um, so there's often a little bit of a lag time, but in general, if we are pursuing, uh, an outbreak or multiple outbreaks, as we start to call people and let them know they'd been a contact.