COVID-19 costs health district about $200K

EPHRATA — The COVID-19 outbreak has cost Grant County Health District around $202,000 in the last six weeks as staffers contact people who have or may have come into contact with those who have tested positive for the virus.

According to GCHD Administrator Theresa Adkinson, the district has staff working seven days a week making phone calls and tracking people down.

“Most of the staff is doing something COVID-related,” she said during an online meeting of the district’s board of directors Wednesday evening. “All staff is spending 85-90 percent of their time on COVID activities.”

The GCHD’s primary job is issuing vital records such as birth certificates and death certificates, inspecting restaurants, sewer and water system to ensure they are safe and meet guidelines, and tracking and helping to treat infectious diseases such as mumps, measles and the COVID-19 outbreak.

The district is still issuing birth and death certificates, Adkinson said, and there is someone on staff to answer the phones. But eight of the district’s 21 staffers are working primarily from home.

The $202,000 the district has spent since the last week of January is about 8 percent of its $2.5 million budget for 2020. When passed in January, the district’s 2020 budget already forecast spending $14,500 more than the district anticipated in revenue, and that money was expected to be drawn from GCHD’s reserve fund.

Adkinson said the district has received $119,000 in emergency funding from the state and has been promised nearly $131,000 in federal funding to reimburse COVID-related expenses. She said a number of grants for specifically targeted programs, such as marijuana education and maternal health, have been freed up by the grantors so the money can be spent on the district’s COVID-19 efforts.

“We’ve already spent it,” Adkinson said of the emergency funds from the state. “I’m going right back to the state to ask for more money.”

Adkinson said the district was expecting to get $300,000 from the state to help house people who don’t have places of their own to stay in but who need to be isolated or quarantined.

County Health Officer Alexander Brzezny said that the rate of new cases has begun to level off, but the curve is still not flat enough yet.

However, he noted that even when the time comes to start reopening businesses and restart community life, “some degree of social distancing will have to continue” in order to ensure the disease doesn’t persist for months.

“We need to reopen in ways that will limit the spread,” he said. “We need to bend the curve sufficiently so we aren’t doing this for months.”

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at cfeatherstone@columbiabasinherald.com.