By DEBRA HAIGHT
St. JOSEPH – COVID-19 related deaths and hospitalizations appear to be leveling off, Berrien County Health Officer Nicki Britten told Berrien County Commissioners last week. She said that while vaccination efforts are underway, prevention procedures still need to be followed.
Last week’s county board meeting included not only the update from Britten, but also a report from Berrien County 9-1-1 Director Caitlin Sampsell on the status of the county’s radio pager systems. In addition, Commissioner Jim Curran said commissioners will be asked to approve a new home for the county public defender’s office in coming weeks.
Britten reported the county is at another plateau in terms of number of cases, hospitalizations and deaths. “We saw a really steep increase in October and November and it slowed down in December,” she said. “I think we’re in a new plateau … The percent positivity rate is going down and is under 10 percent when it had been at 20 percent.”
She noted that the goal continues to be to not overwhelm the area health systems. “The one piece of data that is the best canary in the coal mine is the hospital census, how many are in the hospital for COVID or with COVID, and that’s following a similar trend,” she said. “We’re leveling off with 40 to 50 people in the hospital per day, we’d like to see that lower but it is at a level that’s manageable.”
She said having the new vaccines is wonderful. “It’s wonderful and there is a lot of hope that is coming but it is a longer term investment,” she said. “We’re doing things now to impact people months down the road.”
Britten said the vaccination goals are to prevent the health system from being overwhelmed, to protect the most vulnerable from death and severe morbidity and to vaccinate those eligible including the elderly and health care workers.
“We have close to 40,000 who are eligible but we don’t have enough vaccines to get through that number,” she said. “We are administering hundreds of doses four to five days a week at the health department and at Spectrum Lakeland. The demand is far outstripping the supply.”
She urged the eligible populations wanting to be vaccinated to get on a required waiting list with either the health department or Spectrum. Currently, there are 19,000 or more on waiting lists. She noted that plans are also being worked on with area school districts to conduct educator clinics to vaccinate 3,700 or more teachers in mid-February.
“We’re working through our waiting list for the elderly,” she said. “Those 75 and older are the target right now … We have utilized the National Guard to expand the number of vaccinators and we are also assembling a pool of volunteer nurses. We know we have weeks and months of work ahead of us.”
The county board’s attention then turned to public safety. County 9-1-1 Director Caitlin Sampsell gave an update on the status of public safety radio systems. She reported that law enforcement and emergency services agencies in the county currently use two systems and work is underway to make updates.
She said the emphasis right now is on making improvements to the 800 mghz radio system, which most of the county besides the city of Niles is on. That work includes enhancing the tower at the Watervliet Spectrum Hospital to improve signal coverage, adding a new tower in the south county to replace the one at Bertrand Crossing and partnering with Indiana to increase coverage at the state line.
There is also a push to equip local departments with updated mobile units, portable radios and pagers with the hundreds of thousands of dollars in needed funding to come from local, state and federal sources. The goal is to have everyone switch over to the 800 mghz system by the end of 2022.
Sampsell said the old VHF system which is what the city of Niles uses still has uses such as for on scene incident communications. “I’m not saying that VHF is bad, but it makes sense county wide to support one system,” she said.
The last news came from Administration Committee Chairman Jim Curran who represents Niles Township. He said the county board will be asked to approve a lease for a new building to house the Public Defender Office in coming weeks.
The office had been housed in in a building on Church Street in St. Joseph near the courthouse and will now move to new space in a building on Renaissance Drive. He said other county offices are already in the Renaissance Drive building. The lease amount is expected to be $45,000 for the rest of 2021 and $95,000 for 2022.
He and County Administrator Brian Dissette said other county departments are already vying to take over the Church Street space. Curran noted that the county court administration has already made their pitch for the space and he expects others to do so as well. “The building will not sit vacant, county administration will put someone in there,” he said.
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