HAVRE, Mont. (NMB) – The Hill County Health Board met virtually on Friday afternoon to provide their weekly update on COVID-19 in Hill County.
Health Officer Jessica Sheehy provided more details on the recent surge in cases in the county over the last two weeks, saying all are either travel-related or were found through contact tracing.
“Still not seeing community spread, which is reassuring. And pending tests, obviously are still out, but likely with contact tracing as we’ve been experiencing, once you get one positive, often there are more to follow.”
Many of the new cases have been in children, a trend that Health Director Kim Larson says is likely to continue.
“You’re going to be seeing more of that, because we have a very skewed data set from the very beginning of COVID-19. Because when (COVID-19) showed up here, we shut down everything that had kids in it. We shut down the schools right away and they went home. And now we’re bringing them all back. And sometimes it’s in a hybrid schedule and not everybody’s back at the same time. But we’re going to be seeing more and more cases, and we’re going to be seeing the actual data and the effect that COVID-19 has on them.”
Larson added that her Department, as well as the Hill County Commissioners, have been fielding numerous calls from the public asking why school reopening plans are not the same throughout the County.
“Each school has a different setting and different requirements because of the number of students that are there and the room that they have available to them. The smaller schools are able to have all their students back because they are able to social distance. Havre Public Schools is not able to socially distance students if they have all of their students there at the same time. So they are basically opening in phases because we don’t want to open all the way up just to close all the way down again when you get a case. If they are not socially distant, a majority of those students would be sent home to quarantine, and we’d probably have a large outbreak. Because of the way things are opening now, with hopefully protecting our students, staff and teachers from that situation. Hopefully if…well, when we get a case in our schools, we won’t have to shut them all down and go strictly to remote learning.”
The Health Department will soon be implementing a service called Sara Alert to help with contact tracing. Gallatin County Health Department were the first to implement Sara Alert in Montana.
“They really like it, it helps decrease some of the workload on our nurses that do contact tracing,” Larson said. “We’re a couple weeks out for that to be set up and running in Hill County, but we’re working on that.”
Sheehy also responded to the revised CDC guidelines saying not all close contacts necessarily need to be tested, a move which was criticized by the Governor at his Thursday press conference.
“At this point, unless we are limited by testing, we’re still going to encourage contact tracing. I think research is showing that there is a lot of asypmtomatic individuals out there and that is how we are getting community spread in other communities. We’ve been fortunate we haven’t got there. But my concern about not testing close contacts and allowing them to be out in the community instead is just going to continue to perpetuate that problem.”
The Hill County Health Department is still recommending all gatherings of 50 or more people be postponed, but they will work with event planners on creating safety plans for events that are held.
Hill County has performed 1,396 tests for COVID-19, with seven results still pending. This does not include surveillance tests.
As of Friday evening, Hill County has reported 84 total cases of COVID-19. 36 are active, 46 have recovered and two have died.
This story has been updated after Hill County reported an additional four COVID-19 cases on Friday evening
