County health officer releases COVID statement

On Thursday, August 12, the Ravalli County Public Health Department released an update on the COVID-19 situation from County Health Officer Carol Calderwood, M.D.

“Ravalli County Public Health (RCPH) expects a continued secondary COVID spike as schools resume and as other activities continue to open,” wrote Calderwood. “However, we believe our community is in a much better situation than this time last year. We have partial community immunity, better testing and treatments, and lower percentages of serious illness and death. Our medical facilities have extremely solid plans in place.”

Calderwood also wrote that, “RCPH and other county leaders desire nothing more than continued movement toward normalcy, for the sake of mental and economic health. To this end, we ask each person to do as much as they each can to limit spread of communicable diseases this fall and winter.  CDC guidance for K-12 is based on current scientific evidence and lessons learned from schools implementing COVID-19 prevention strategies. Public Health believes these guidelines to be a best practice for the nation as a whole and recommends Ravalli County residents, at a minimum, follow the Board of Health recommendations:

“1. Everyone wash their hands often;

2. If an Employee, Teacher or Student is sick, stay home;

3. It is the personal choice of Parent(s), Students, Teachers and Employees to wear a mask or not; and

4. Encourage tolerance and respect of personal choices.  

“We ask schools and employers to continue to adapt and to support expected increased numbers of unplanned absences. 

“Most of all, Ravalli County leaders hope that our community will start to come together to heal, realizing that everyone is fatigued and that each individual desires the best outcome for our society, despite various outlooks and points of view.

“Through this slow process RCPH will still be working every day to make recommendations for prevention, follow up on cases, and trouble shoot issues as they arise.”

After Calderwood’s statement was released, Dr. Marshall Bloom, Chief of the Biology of Vector-borne Viruses Section at the Laboratory of Virology at Rocky Mountain Laboratories, sent an email which contained the following request:

“I appreciate this timely and informative announcement,” wrote Bloom. “Perhaps you can walk us through the process by which it was decided not to say anything about COVID-19 vaccination and how concerned residents might get immunized. I am a bit surprised that this was not even mentioned in the otherwise excellent letter.”

Dr. Calderwood responded: “Thanks Marshall. Good point, but it was implied in ’partial community immunity’ and our current focus was more toward procedures in schools. We can certainly follow it up up with another press release soon…”

From Katie Scholl, a member of the Board of Health, Bloom got this response: “I know the question presented to us at the BOH meeting involved masks. My personal focus was to provide the schools with something to work with due to the current environment and decisions being made by the schools. Honestly, I personally didn’t think to include vaccinations since Tiffany [Tiffany Webber, the Public Health Nurse] and her staff have been [sic] such a great job of getting the information about and access to vaccination. My personal apologies for the oversight. FYI Dr. Calderwood wasn’t present at the meeting so she is just following our statement. 

“Perhaps, Tiffany and her crew could step up media usage (radio, print news) to provide the vaccination access information.”

Bloom responded: “Thanks, Katie. It just struck me as a little odd that immunization was not referenced, particularly since kids 12 and over are eligible. And of course, much of the vaccine supplies in the county is nearing expiry.

 “I look forward to seeing some stepped up  COVID-19 immunization information, and would be happy to assist in that effort. Some of the news stories are truly heartbreaking.

 “And by the way, the WHO estimates that tens of millions of children around the world have failed to get the routine childhood immunizations. Has the BOH looked at the situation for those immunizations in our county? Smallpox, measles, mumps, polio, rubella, and hep b are all pandemics that were vanquished with vaccines. It would be beyond tragic to have those pandemics reawaken here.

 “I appreciate your reply. Marshall”