Health department will add staff to handle COVID surge

Palm Coast Observer
News

The Florida Department of Health in Flagler County is planning to hire more staff to deal with the current COVID-19 surge and the impending reopening of local schools.

Health department offers vaccination and testing options

The Florida Department of Health in Flagler County will be offering COVID-19 testing and vaccination on the following schedule beginning the week of Aug. 9:

4:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. Monday through Friday
Drive-through testing (by appointment only)
Walk-in Pfizer vaccination (no appointment needed)
Flagler County Health Department, 301 Dr. Carter Blvd., Bunnell

The health department’s drive-thru testing operation prioritizes people with COVID-like symptoms and close contacts of confirmed cases (the health department does not offer testing for travel verification). Make an appointment by calling 386-437-7350, Ext. 0, on weekdays between 8 a.m. and 4:30 p.m.

The health department's “Test to Stay” school testing option will offer testing and vaccinations for students, faculty and staff seven days a week. Details will be shared with the school community on Monday, Aug. 9.

"The Delta Variant is highly contagious, which supports why Flagler County has reported more than 600 positive cases each week for the past two weeks," said Robert Snyder, health officer for DOH-Flagler. "Please get vaccinated, not for yourself, but for your family, your neighbors and others in our community who cannot get vaccinated. Wear a mask when indoors or large group settings, wash your hands and social distance whenever possible. This is our shot, Flagler. Stay safe.”

For more information about COVID-19 vaccination and testing efforts, please visit https://flhealthcovid19.gov/.

— Gretchen Smith, communications manager, Florida Department of Health-Flagler

"We're gearing up; we're going to have to hire a whole lot more nurses," health department Communications Manager Gretchen Smith said on Flagler Broadcasting's "Free For All Friday" on Aug. 6.

The department may also add paramedics as it prepares to offer more COVID-19 testing options.

Flagler Schools students and staff will be able to receive rapid COVID-19 tests through the health department at a site at 120 Airport Road.

If they've been notified through contact tracing that they've potentially been exposed to the virus, rapid tests taken at the health department's testing site every other day will allow them to stay in school as long as the tests come back negative.

Still, the district's current policy — not requiring masks and distancing, but contact tracing and requiring sudden who've been exposed to stay home until a test clears them — "is pretty likely to result in a lot of cases and a lot of kids out of school," FDOH-Flagler Medical Director Dr. Stephen Bickel said.

If that's the case, Bickel said, "What we're hoping is that we adapt to that. ... The school staff, administrators, have shown a readiness to be open-minded as the facts change."

The virus' numbers continue to increase, while new vaccinations have slowed to a trickle.

The health department recorded 150 positive cases of COVID-19 yesterday and has been averaging about 100 a day, said Smith.

"The numbers are really going through the roof in terms of cases — and that’s just diagnosed cases," Bickel said. "There are probably at least two or three times as many actual cases."

Meanwhile, said Smith, the numbers of people coming to the department's vaccination events is often under 10.

"We'd like to be doing more vaccinations than tests, and that's not the case right now," Smith said.

Infections that lead to hospitalization have overwhelmingly been in the unvaccinated population.

Patients in the current surge are trending younger: AdventHealth's Central Florida division has had a number of cases of pregnant women getting ill enough from COVID-19 that they've required ventilators, Bickel said.

"Youngish patients, pregnant, on ventilators — that is very scary stuff," he said.

Nationally, hospitals have been reporting that between 92% and 98% of their COVID patients are unvaccinated, Bickel said.

"People should take home the message that they are extremely well protected if they have been vaccinated, unless they're in this small group of people with immune conditions ... and those people should know that already," he said.