Sawyer D’Argonne / sdargonne@summitdaily.com
FRISCO — As Summit County officials continue to respond to the unprecedented health and economic impacts of the coronavirus pandemic, the county’s emergency manager is shifting his gaze back to the area’s other natural hazards to prepare for the seasons ahead.
The Summit County Office of Emergency Management is looking to bring on some extra help in the form of a temporary COVID-19 emergency coordinator, who will ultimately be tasked with taking over the day-to-day operations of the office’s novel coronavirus response. The coordinator will give Emergency Manager Brian Bovaird the freedom to start taking other important projects off the back burner, like the county’s wildfire mitigation and spring runoff plans.
“These large incidents serve like a magnifying glass to all of the things you knew were your weaknesses,” Bovaird said. “For us, that’s staffing and having a one-person emergency management office when a global pandemic hits. … This is so vastly different from any other incident anyone has dealt with. So there’s been a huge learning curve. It’s been exhausting trying to juggle all the pieces of the puzzle.”
Earlier this year, Bovaird said the county began a new program to help the Office of Emergency Management prepare for a possible surge. The program would identify individuals already working with the county whose jobs could be updated with new responsibilities during an emergency to help deal with logistics and planning efforts within the county’s Emergency Operations Center.
Support Local Journalism
But the program hadn’t fallen into place before the pandemic hit, and there’s no time to train people on the fly.
“It’s next to impossible to serve as the (emergency operations center) manager and the director of emergency management,” Bovaird said. “One of the biggest things is having that overall picture, and hanging in the (emergency operations center), it’s easy to get in the weeds keeping that system running. I don’t have the ability to really absorb all the information that’s coming in, and those really critical conversations with stakeholders around the county have been limited because of how much of my time is spent managing the (center).”
As the complexity of the new coronavirus response continues to grow, more help is needed with the overlapping response, recovery and reimbursement phases.
The new COVID-19 emergency coordinator will help take the load off Bovaird, who is hoping to solidify response plans related to other potential emergencies and disasters. Bovaird said his first priority is spring runoff before moving into other planning efforts around wildfires and evacuations, both of which could create major problems for officials if an emergency were to strike later this year.
The county’s designated evacuation point is at Summit Middle School, though alternatives are already in place for “non-congregate” sheltering during the COVID-19 response, allowing displaced individuals to stay in local hotels instead of grouped together in one location. But after the public health order lifts and lodging reopens to visitors, officials will have to come up with something else.
“This is the intersection of what’s going on with the COVID-19 response and how it’s affecting how we’d normally handle other incidents,” Bovaird said. “Just because we’re in the middle of a global pandemic doesn’t mean wildfires stop. … We have a lot of ideas but not necessarily any solutions yet.”
Realistically, Bovaird said any mass shelter scenario likely would involve a number of combined responses to allow affected individuals to social distance from one another. So instead of one school opening as a shelter, it might be all of the county’s school and faith establishments or even the creation of temporary barriers in existing facilities.
Bovaird said the new COVID-19 coordinator could start as early as next week.
“It will be a huge benefit,” Bovaird said. “There’s an urgent need for this person to take over day-to-day operations of the COVID-19 issues so I can focus on all of these things.”
Public Health Department
The Office of Emergency Management isn’t the only department struggling to keep up during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Summit County Public Health Department is also looking to expand its team as new testing capacities continue to increase the demand for public messaging and contact tracing.
The public health team is currently composed of about 15 people, including staff members, repurposed county employees and retired staff that have returned to help out. But as testing numbers continue to grow, so has the need for more workers.
For every person who tests positive for COVID-19 within the county, the Public Health Department is typically contacting between two and 10 others who came into close contact with that person, according to the county’s Director of Communications Julie Sutor.
“Every time you get a positive, you have to do the contact tracing on that person to understand who were the close contacts and what we are going to do to isolate and quarantine where we need to,” Assistant County Manager Sarah Vaine said. “… We were doing an average of five to 10 tests a day, and when that ramps up to 40-50 tests a day, you can see how there’s an exponential jump in the number of people that need to be interviewed.”
Vaine said the department is hoping to double the size of its surveillance and contact tracing team in the near future, primarily through volunteers who will undergo training on how to effectively run through the process.
Vaine emphasized that any staffing concerns for the department are relatively new and were spurred by a jump in testing capacity last week. She went on to laud the department for its preparedness when the crisis hit.
“They did a lot of work in advance of this pandemic and were able to move into their roles really smoothly,” Vaine said. “… They’re working very long hours, they miss their families, and its certainly stressful feeling the responsibility on their shoulders to manage this as best as possible. But they’ve built a great team, and they’ve prepared for this type of thing for many years to put us in good shape.”