During a Zoom meeting live-streamed on Facebook, Stamp offered a timeline of events from the county’s first case at Porter Regional Hospital, a LaPorte County resident admitted to the facility on March 14, to most the most recent number of cases at the time of the meeting, which stood at 78 then.
“We talk about the curve and it is rising. That is expected and happening around Indiana,” she said.
In a mark of how quickly the pandemic has changed public life, Stamp said that in early March, hundreds of participants gathered at Valparaiso University for a regional preparedness summit on the new coronavirus.
The crowd included first responders and elected officials.
“Looking back on it, it probably wasn’t the wisest thing to do,” she said. “As far as I know, we are all OK, thankfully, but it was a poor decision.”
She also discussed testing protocol for the virus and said Porter Regional Hospital follows “very narrow” guidelines for testing, though turnaround for results there has been relatively fast.
Kouts Family Clinic had the ability to test early but there is a lag of when results come back and testing there is slowing with test kit availability.
The health department looked at its options and was able to get some test kits, which can be sent to Alverno Laboratories in Hammond for results in two to three days.
“Where we see our role is where we see there is a significant public health need and someone can’t get testing elsewhere,” Stamp said.
That included a community member with a fever who came in contact with local police officers, which Stamp said was “helpful to get our police officers back in commission in short order.”
The health department also has received permission to use the county’s vehicle emission test sites in Valparaiso and Portage which are now closed because of the pandemic for mass testing if the county needs them, she said.
The health department also is working with 911 Communications because dispatchers wanted to know where suspected cases are in case first responders have to be dispatched to those residences, Stamp said, and a sheriff’s department analyst is going to go through the health department’s data on COVID-19 to see if health officials are overlooking anything.
Twenty-three of the 78 cases reported as of the board meeting came from 10 families, Stamp said, including transmission between spouses, adding the virus “really is a disease that is caused by close contact.”
The state health department’s “strike team” also has been working with a long-term care facility in recent days.
“We did have a positive case of an employee in one of the long-term care facilities in Porter County. Actually, there were a couple employees who were positive,” Stamp said.
The strike team has been helping with widescale testing at the facility and doing “best protocol procedures” to prevent the virus from spreading, Stamp said.
While board members who are doctors talked about what they are seeing in health care, board attorney David Hollenbeck fought back his emotions as he discussed the experience of his daughter and son-in-law, who are doctors in Indianapolis, and their three children.
“Unfortunately, in the Hollenbeck family, we have had very real experience with the virus,” he said.
“It’s nothing to laugh at,” he said. “I’ve seen from my family, this is nothing you want to get on purpose.”
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