Coronavirus cases continue to zoom upward

School District 6 continues to do pretty well handling the coronavirus, but the pandemic overall is taking a toll on health professionals and people charged with tracing disease contacts countywide.

Last week the district reported four active cases, with 106 students actively quarantined, or about 5 percent of the total population.

At Ruder Elementary, one entire class has been out due to a case and close contacts. Ruder currently has 16 students quarantined.

The high school has the most at 42 active, followed by the junior high at 29 and Glacier Gateway at 19. All told, four staff are currently quarantined.

However, the high school had four more confirmed cases announced on Monday and the junior high added another as well. Other area schools aren’t faring as well — Libby announced last week it was closing an entire elementary school after evidence of spread within the building. After the quarantine requirements, the school wouldn’t have enough staff to keep it open, school officials told the Western News.

So far, there’s been no evidence of spread within buildings of School District 6.

Not everyone is happy with the quarantine requirements, however.

A group of parents recently wrote the school board asking that the length of the quarantine be shortened, but vice chair Dean Chisholm noted at last week’s board meeting that in order for schools to reopen at all, they had to have an approved plan by the state and local health departments.

Those plans required a 14-day quarantine, which the school is bound by.

As of Friday, Flathead County had more than 1,200 active cases and was adding between 60 and 100 day.

The Flathead City-County Board of Health, however, declined on Thursday to enact any new restrictions in a 5-3 vote. The board made the decision to take no action on a proposal that would have required organizers of

events expecting 50 to 499 people to submit a detailed plan outlining protective measures and environmental controls to reduce the risk of disease transmission at least 14 days prior to the event or gathering.

The order would have banned gatherings of more than 500 people in the county.

Prior to the agenda being approved for the meeting, the board removed from the agenda the portion of the proposal that would have added tighter restrictions on area bars, restaurants and churches. The proposed order would have limited social gatherings to no more than 25 people, regardless of the ability to socially distance, and would have reduced capacity to bars and restaurants and churches to 25%.

By removing that part of the proposal from the agenda, no board discussion was held on those proposed restrictions.

Health Board members Annie Bukacek, Bill Burg, Pamela Holmquist, Ardis Larsen and Ronalee Skees voted to take no action on the remaining portion of the Health Department’s proposal regarding crowd sizes, while board members Peter Heyboer, Roger Noble and Kyle Waterman did not favor that course of action.

“Our office is drowning in COVID cases right now,” interim County Health Officer Tamalee St. James Robinson told the board after the decision. “We have 29 temporary staff and 11 regular staff and we are losing people every day that have been at the health department for years. This is a really, really hard job dealing with something that hasn’t just been going on for a week or month. We have been dealing with this for six months.”

She went on to say that she would like to see her department be able to complete contact tracing on new cases within 24 hours, but staff shortages and 80 to 100 new cases each day has led to the task taking two to three days, leading to an increase of the spread of the virus throughout the community.

“We will do the best we can, but this is an impossible job. It’s incredibly hard on our employees and we have been put in an impossible position,” Robinson said.

But some boardmembers view the pandemic differently.

Dr. Annie Bukacek voiced her opinion that COVID-19 is not as serious a threat as people may believe.

Bukacek, who attributes the rising number of cases to a rise in testing numbers, argued that the mortality numbers do not back up the need for increased restrictions.

“If you look at the death rate in Montana based on the government CDC (Centers for Disease Control) data, it’s a 0.2 percent death rate. That is two per 10,000 cases, and that’s if you believe the CDC’s data, which not all of us do. Statistically, for practical purposes, COVID in Montana has 100 percent survival rate,” she said. “I’m not saying that the people who die don’t matter, but in terms of an imminent threat, I’ve never seen anything with such a low death rate.”

In his report to the board, Kalispell Regional Healthcare CEO Craig Lambrecht reported that the hospitalization rate for COVID cases in Flathead County is around 7%, with a mortality rate of between 0.5 and 1%, but his biggest worry right now is keeping the area hospitals staffed.

“Caring for COVID patients is very labor-intensive, so our biggest issue right now is the stress on our staff. We do have adequate beds right now, the issue is staffing for the beds,” he said. “We’re busy, it’s crazy and the stress on our staff is real. We are just going to plan on this continuing for the long haul.”

To date, 235 people have died of the disease in Montana. As of Friday, 319 were hospitalized.

Jeremy Weber contributed to this story.