Slowing the pandemic is county strategy
The goal is to keep hospitals from being overrun
Marathon County’s basic strategy to combat the coronavirus (COVID-19) will be to “slow the peak,” health officer Joan Theurer told county supervisors on Thursday.
The virus will find Marathon County, she said, but she is hopeful people will take enough preventative measures to slow the spread of the disease so that local doctors and hospitals are not overwhelmed by a surge of cases. “Our hospitals were built for routine care, not for volumes of patients in a pandemic,” she told county board members. “If we don’t control the number of people in a pandemic, the hospitals won’t be able to deal with the normal number of heart attacks, strokes, broken arms and that sort of thing. We want to avoid overloading our public health system.”
Theurer said the lesson of the Spanish Flu of 1918 is that social isolation of people is effective in slowing the spread of disease.
“We know that it does work,” she said.
The health officer said the Marathon County Health Department practices social isolation all the time to curb infectious disease, namely tuberculosis.
“Every year, Marathon County gets between one to three cases of TB,” she said. “We curtail the spread of that disease such that the public doesn’t even know that it is here. And we protect the identity of the individuals involved.”
Theurer said orders by the state to close schools, bars and restaurants and to limit mass gatherings to 10 people are all aimed at keeping people away from each other and to slow the spread of COVID- 19.
She said her department is committed to providing the public with “timely, accurate and consistent” information about the path of the disease.
She said both area hospitals and the health department have been overwhelmed by calls for information. She said United Way 2-1-1 will give people coronavirus information with constantly updated scripts.
In discussion with board members, county administrator Lance Leonhard said the sheriff’s department has ratcheted up screening of prisoners at the county jail to avoid an outbreak at that facility.
He said county officials have “doubled down” on planning and continue to discuss how best to meet the public need as the coronavirus spreads and how best to protect county employees.
“This is new every day,” he said., “It is new every hour.”
Theurer said that it is up to people to follow social distancing guidelines and to continue to wash hands and disinfect work spaces.
“If everybody does these things, we will be okay and we’ll be okay faster,” she said. “If not, it will not be as easy to bounce back and to bounce back economically.”
According to the Center for Disease Control, the corona virus, which continues to spread quickly across the country, has infected 44,183 people in 50 states and four territories with 544 deaths. In Wisconsin, according to Department of Health and Human Services, there are 457 confirmed cases in 30 counties.
