marion county covid-19 update — 12–6–2020 results cases latest news

24 min readDec 6, 2020

Two additional deaths due to COVID-19 were reported to the State of Iowa Coronavirus Database Saturday. There are a total of 2,157 positive tests, and Marion County Public Health considered 1,938 to be recovered in their most recent weekly report. There were 114 new cases over the past week, and there are eight residents hospitalized with COVID-19.

As of Friday, 1.8% of students were absent in the Pella Community School District for any reason. Of those, 17 were positive with COVID-19, and 26 were out for another reason — and while the number of positive cases is the highest to date for the district, the overall trend for absences remained largely steady over the previous week. Quarantine numbers remained on average nearly the same in Pella as well, with 4.3% of students in quarantine but participating in off-site learning. Those numbers are a trend down from a district-high mark of 7% reported on November 20th. Staff absences were at 1.9% district-wide as well.

The latest COVID-19 data from the Pella School District can be found here.

At the end of this past week, there were 34 staff and students absent from the PCM school district for a COVID-19 related reason, or 2.7% of the district’s population.

As of Friday evening, more than 278,000 Americans had died of COVID-19, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. The U.S. reported more than 2,800 coronavirus-related deaths Wednesday — a record COVID-19 death toll for a single day. Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said this Wednesday: “The reality is December and January and February are going to be rough times. I actually believe they are going to be the most difficult time in the public health history of this nation.” Lancaster County reported 720 new coronavirus cases Friday, shattering the previous high mark of 482 cases on Nov. 27. Also Friday, Pennsylvania’s 11,763 new cases also set a record. Lancaster County Coroner Dr. Stephen Diamantoni reported 23 new COVID-19 deaths last week, bringing the pandemic’s total here to 525.

Please read the searing column written by Lancaster County intensive care unit nurse Nikkee Asashon in today’s Perspective section.

In heartbreaking detail, she explains what it’s like to comfort patients as they prepare to be intubated — that is, to have a breathing tube threaded down their throats toward their lungs, so a ventilator can do the work their lungs are too weak and too sick to do. To comfort family members as they watch helplessly as their sedated loved ones slip away. To comfort co-workers as they care for COVID-19 patients.

“I have been a critical care nurse for almost 15 years and I have never felt this physically, emotionally and mentally exhausted — and all of that is intensified by realizing that, after all of these months, people still aren’t listening,” Asashon writes.

People still are not taking the necessary precautions that might help to stem the surge of COVID-19 precautions overwhelming hospitals now.

They’re still going to holiday and birthday parties. They’re still going out unmasked, despite a state order that requires that masks be worn wherever people from different households gather. They’re still assuming that should their loved ones get infected by the novel coronavirus, they’ll be fine because the president assured them COVID-19 was no big deal, back when he was acknowledging the pandemic and not trying desperately to undermine the November election and American democracy itself.

Please, heed Asashon’s words, and not those of Josh Parsons, chairman of the Lancaster County Board of Commissioners, who last week posted this on both Twitter and Facebook: “Hopefully at some point leaders will realize the most effective way to deal with Covid is to treat Americans like the free citizens they are, provide them with accurate information so they can make good choices for themselves/their families, and protect their constitutional rights.”

The most effective way to deal with COVID-19? Parsons wouldn’t recognize it if it walked up to him and introduced itself.

We’re angry

We admit we’re angry today.

Angry that hospitals are filling with COVID-19 patients and nearing the point when they’ll not only run out of beds but might not have enough healthy employees to staff them.

Angry that many Lancaster County schoolchildren have seen their school year be disrupted because the pandemic is out of control.

Angry that health care workers like Asashon are being asked to carry the burden of this pandemic, because too many of us refused to embrace simple, effective measures like mask-wearing, social distancing and staying at home as much as possible.

Angry that the federal government still hasn’t developed a comprehensive national strategy for dealing with the pandemic.

Angry that Democrats in the state Legislature, including Lancaster state Rep. Mike Sturla, have been essentially nonfactors in the fight against COVID-19.

Angry that Republicans like Parsons continue to insist that restrictions aiming at curbing COVID-19 infection are somehow tyrannical, just because they were conceived by people on the other side of the political aisle.

Are we broken?

How did combating a pandemic become a partisan battle? Are we that broken as a country that we cannot respond to this dire moment with the sort of unified, all-hands-on-deck determination that enabled our parents and grandparents to prevail in World War II?

We understand that a streak of libertarianism runs through Lancaster County. But even stronger, we thought, were our shared ethics of decency, the golden rule and loving one’s neighbors. We still think those values are prized here. It just seems sometimes that they are drowned out by those espousing an every-person-for-himself, survival-of-the-fittest mentality. The land of the free isn’t meant to equate to “Lord of the Flies.”

We should be able to care about senior citizens and people of color dying disproportionately of COVID-19 — and the financial distress of small business owners. We should expect our leaders to make tough decisions for the common good even when those decisions aren’t politically expedient.

Months ago, even as evidence grew that widespread mask-wearing could curtail COVID-19 infection, Parsons resisted mandating masks in the Lancaster County Government Center. He told LNP | LancasterOnline in an email that there was “no legal basis in statute for requiring mask use and doing so would not be appropriate.” He also said personal liberty was a factor.

But government officials make judgments based on public health and safety all the time. Most people aren’t allowed to carry firearms in court buildings. Smoking isn’t permitted in government buildings.

Masks, however, were deemed to be oppressive by some on the political right, and President Donald Trump seemed to associate them with weakness, so when Parsons and other local Republican leaders attended Trump events, they circulated photographs of themselves on social media not wearing masks. What a lost opportunity for modeling good pandemic practices. What a missed opportunity to show some leadership.

Leaders needed

Because this crisis demands leadership — as well as a willingness to work with people across the political divide — Gov. Tom Wolf should have found some way to work with reasonable Republicans on COVID-19 mitigation. Republicans should have focused on the real enemy — the novel coronavirus — instead of on partisan arguments with Wolf.

This crisis also demands that we start preparing for the next one. Parsons and fellow Republican Commissioner Ray D’Agostino should admit that the county needs a public health department and begin working toward the goal of establishing one.

Last week, we learned that The Gardens at Stevens — a Denver Borough nursing home that previously had managed to keep COVID-19 infections at bay — has seen the virus infect at least 50 residents and kill 18 since mid-November.

“I don’t know specifically what happened in this facility; I can say generally that COVID-19 infections in the county continue to increase,” county Coroner Diamantoni said. “It’s hard to completely isolate people in the community from that facility.”

We’re struck by several things as we consider Diamantoni’s statement: that the county didn’t know that a nursing home was being overwhelmed by COVID-19 — affirming the need for a county health department that might have been able to deploy infection-control resources to that facility. That state oversight clearly needs to be strengthened. And, finally, that people in nursing homes cannot be isolated from the community.

What we do, what our elected officials do, will determine just what the next few months look like. We are failing now in our fight against COVID-19. We need to act. Our elected officials need to act.

Nikkee Asashon and her fellow health care workers need us to come through for them.

BURLINGTON, Vt. — By late morning on Oct. 28, staff at the University of Vermont Medical Center noticed the hospital’s phone system wasn’t working.

Then the internet went down, and the Burlington-based center’s technical infrastructure with it. Employees lost access to databases, digital health records, scheduling systems and other online tools they rely on for patient care.

Administrators scrambled to keep the hospital operational — cancelling non-urgent appointments, reverting to pen-and-paper record keeping and rerouting some critical care patients to nearby hospitals.

In its main laboratory, which runs about 8,000 tests a day, employees printed or hand-wrote results and carried them across facilities to specialists. Outdated, internet-free technologies experienced a revival.

“We went around and got every fax machine that we could,” said UVM Medical Center Chief Operating Officer Al Gobeille.

The Vermont hospital had fallen prey to a cyberattack, becoming one of the most recent and visible examples of a wave of digital assaults taking U.S. health care providers hostage as COVID-19 cases surge nationwide.

The same day as UVM’s attack, the FBI and two federal agencies warned cybercriminals were ramping up efforts to steal data and disrupt services across the health care sector.

By targeting providers with attacks that scramble and lock up data until victims pay a ransom, hackers can demand thousands or millions of dollars and wreak havoc until they’re paid.

In September, for example, a ransomware attack paralyzed a chain of more than 250 U.S. hospitals and clinics. The resulting outages delayed emergency room care and forced staff to restore critical heart rate, blood pressure and oxygen level monitors with ethernet cabling.

A few weeks earlier, in Germany, a woman’s death became the first fatality thought to result from a ransomware attack. Earlier in October, facilities in Oregon, New York, Michigan, Wisconsin and California also fell prey to suspected ransomware attacks.

Ransomware is also partly to blame for some of the nearly 700 private health information breaches, affecting about 46.6 million people and currently being investigated by the federal government. In the hands of a criminal, a single patient record — rich with details about a person’s finances, insurance and medical history — can sell for upward of $1,000 on the black market, experts say.

Over the course of 2020, many hospitals postponed technology upgrades or cybersecurity training that would help protect them from the newest wave of attacks, said health care security consultant Nick Culbertson.

“The amount of chaos that’s just coming to a head here is a real threat,” he said.

With COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations climbing nationwide, experts say health care providers are dangerously vulnerable to attacks on their ability to function efficiently and manage limited resources.

Even a small technical disruption can quickly ripple out into patient care when a center’s capacity is stretched thin, said Vanderbilt University’s Eric Johnson, who studies the health impacts of cyberattacks.

“November has been a month of escalating demands on hospitals,” he said. “There’s no room for error. From a hacker’s perspective, it’s perfect.”

A ‘CALL TO ARMS’

FOR HOSPITALS

The day after the Oct. 28 cyberattack, 53-year-old Joel Bedard, of Jericho, arrived for a scheduled appointment at the Burlington hospital.

He was able to get in, he said, because his fluid-draining treatment is not high-tech and is something he’s gotten regularly as he waits for a liver transplant.

“I got through, they took care of me, but man, everything is down,” Bedard said. He said he saw no other patients that day. Much of the medical staff idled, doing crossword puzzles and explaining they were forced to document everything by hand.

“All the students and interns are like, ‘How did this work back in the day?’” he said.

Since the attack, the Burlington-based hospital network has referred all questions about its technical details to the FBI, which has refused to release any additional information, citing an ongoing criminal investigation. Officials don’t think any patient suffered immediate harm or that any personal patient information was compromised.

But more than a month later, the hospital is still recovering.

Some employees have been furloughed until they can return to their regular duties.

Oncologists could not access older patient scans which could help them, for example, compare tumor size over time.

And, until recently, emergency department clinicians could take X-rays of broken bones but couldn’t electronically send the images to radiologists at other sites in the health network.

“We didn’t even have internet,” said Dr. Kristen DeStigter, chair of UVM Medical Center’s radiology department.

Soldiers with the state’s National Guard cyber unit have helped hospital IT workers scour the programming code in hundreds of computers and other devices, line by line, to wipe any remaining malicious code that could re-infect the system. Many have been brought back online, but others were replaced entirely.

Col. Christopher Evans said it’s the first time the unit, which was founded about 20 years ago, has been called upon to perform what the guard calls “a real-world” mission. “We have been training for this day for a very long time,” he said.

It could be several more weeks before all the related damage is repaired and the systems are operating normally again, Gobeille said.

“I don’t want to get peoples’ hopes up and be wrong,” he said. “Our folks have been working 24/7. They are getting closer and closer every day.”

It will be a scramble for other health care providers to protect themselves against the growing threat of cyberattacks if they haven’t already, said data security expert Larry Ponemon.

“It’s not like hospital systems need to do something new,” he said. “They just need to do what they should be doing anyway.”

Current industry reports indicate health systems spend only 4% to 7% of their IT budget on cybersecurity, whereas other industries like banking or insurance spend three times as much.

Research by Ponemon’s consulting firm shows only about 15% of health care organizations have adopted the technology, training and procedures necessary to manage and thwart the stream of cyberattacks they face on a regular basis.

“The rest are out there flying with their head down. That number is unacceptable,” Ponemon said. “It’s a pitiful rate.”

And it’s part of why cybercriminals have focused their attention on health care organizations — especially now, as hospitals across the country are coping with a surge of COVID-19 patients, he said.

“We’re seeing true clinical impact,” said health care cybersecurity consultant Dan L. Dodson. “This is a call to arms.”

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Renault reported from New York.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Idaho is weeks behind on contact tracing efforts, as some infected Idahoans refuse to cooperate and the fall’s surge of COVID-19 cases overwhelms the public health infrastructure.

As a result, public health departments haven’t been able to accurately report the number of Idahoans with COVID-19, or to quickly find and notify others who may have been infected.

Public health officials hope that federal funds to help with COVID-19 response, and new personnel from the Idaho National Guard, can get them back on track.

IDAHO’S CORONAVIRUS CASES SURGE, STRAINING HEALTH DISTRICTS

Idaho’s long wave of coronavirus cases is not only straining underfunded, understaffed and overworked public health districts trying to survive a pandemic, it also hampers their ability to trace the virus’s spread through communities across the state.

Before the pandemic created an emergency, communities would have needed about 15 contact tracers per 100,000 residents to prevent transmission of things like HIV, sexually transmitted infections and tuberculosis, according to a position paper from the National Association of County and City Health Officials.

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Idaho is tied for 35th in the U.S. when it comes to bolstering its contact-tracing workforce to aid in COVID-19, having added 4% more tracers, according to the website CovidActNow.org.

Central District Health — an area with more than 500,000 residents and six hospitals that are stretched thin by COVID-19 — had 30 people on its contact tracing staff as of Wednesday.

Six of Idaho’s seven public health districts have a total of 142 employees on their contact tracing teams. (Southwest District Health didn’t respond Friday to a question about the size of its contact tracing team.) Idaho Department of Health and Welfare did not provide the total number of contact tracers in Idaho, but directed the Statesman to ask the health districts themselves.

Many of those employees help with contact tracing work part time, while juggling other job duties.

Central District Health plans to bring on six more in the next two weeks. South Central Public Health District has help from nursing students, and 10 Idaho National Guard members now working full-time, starting this week, spokesperson Brianna Bodily said. Panhandle Health District also has four Idaho National Guard members on the team now, and eight volunteers who help on a rotating basis, spokesperson Katherine Hoyer said.

When the pandemic began, officials at Central District Health didn’t think they would need to ramp up contact tracing as much as they did, “because community restrictions would have to be put in place to protect our hospitals and to keep the virus from getting into our high risk groups such as those residing in long term care facilities,” District Director Russ Duke explained via email.

Then, the summer surge arrived in July. There were more than 1,000 cases per week for four weeks “and the health systems didn’t get overwhelmed,” he said. “This meant that in order to keep up with the investigations, we needed a lot more staff. Finding people with the right skill sets became a challenge as we were competing with our neighboring health district and the Department of Health and Welfare for the same talent. We have also experienced a lot of turnover with the positions because they are temporary and people we hired moved on to permanent positions. High turnover strains the supervisor level staff in the disease response structure as they are having to spend much of their time on training rather than assisting with the investigations.”

In addition to Gov. Brad Little mobilizing National Guard staff to help with COVID-19 response, Idaho’s public health districts were granted “significant funding” to cover the cost of pandemic-related activities, said Bonnie Spencer, CDH chief operations officer.

Central District Health had access to nearly $2.6 million for that work, as of Halloween. In addition, CDH can tap $1.8 million of federal CARES Act money for COVID-19 expenses that aren’t covered by other funding sources, she said.

The state has made up to $6.9 million of CARES Act funds available to the health districts.

The Idaho North Central Health District has six “partially reassigned staff” and six newly hired contact tracers on its contact tracing team, said spokesperson Tara Macke.

Macke said that “without CARES (Act) funding, we would not have had the budget to hire any new staff.”

Central District Health has seen “upwards of 2,500 to 3,000 cases over the last several weeks, and they’re a couple weeks behind with going through” those, said Brandon Atkins, spokesperson for Central District Health. “New resources are coming on board, and they are doing everything they can to keep up with it.”

Atkins says the majority of people are cooperative. But the number “who are reticent or aren’t as likely to cooperate is large enough that it’s challenging to our staff … and that is making it hard for our staff to do their jobs.”

Central District Health and most other public health districts in Idaho issued news releases last month, telling the public the surge of coronavirus cases “have created backlogs and delays … making it impossible to contact all new reported cases or those individual’s close contact.”

COVID-19 signs are posted in the lobby at South Central Public Health District in Twin Falls on Wednesday, Aug. 26, 2020. Drew Nash DNASH@MAGICVALLEY.COM

With no end in sight, the districts asked people to take public health into their own hands.

“Because of the backlogs, public health districts report a growing number of people are not getting a call from their offices and urge anyone who is awaiting a test result or who receives a positive test result to take their own proactive measures to protect themselves and those around them,” the news release said.

Southwest District Health put a number on that backlog at its board meeting in mid-November.

Doug Doney, Southwest District Health general support services division administrator, told the board that 4,400 cases were reported in the prior 30 days. The department had been able to interview 2,300 of those people.

“We’ve obviously seen a huge increase in the numbers over the last few weeks,” Doney said. “It’s quite large, and it’s not slowing down at this point. Just this last weekend, we had over 750 cases reported.”

WHY DOES CONTACT TRACING MATTER IN IDAHO?

Contact tracing is one of the key parts of a pandemic response. A failure to quickly communicate with COVID-19 patients slows everything down.

Contact tracing wasn’t invented to stop COVID-19. It goes back centuries in human civilization — used for cholera, tuberculosis and infectious diseases like syphilis.

“In the 1960s, when rates of syphilis soared again, physicians were required to report cases to health departments, which had the manpower to interview patients and follow up all contacts,” three public health professors wrote in July for The Conversation. “Physicians had long exercised an ethical duty to warn sexual contacts, but as a health department practice, contact tracing fundamentally relied on the cooperation of patients. Confidentiality, therefore, became standard practice. Investigators would never confirm the name of the patient to a contact, even if it could only be one person, like a spouse.”

That trust faltered during the early years of the AIDS epidemic, they wrote. Patients were reluctant to cooperate with contact tracing due to stigma and laws against homosexuality in the mid-1980s, they wrote.

But local epidemiologists worked with the public for years to successfully trace contacts and notify people of exposure, Atkins said.

“For years and years, as an epidemiologist, I (would) talk to people about their most intimate bodily functions,” he said. “People enjoyed having someone who could help talk to them and help them understand what was going on. We’re calling and trying to have better health outcomes.”

Contact tracing teams ask about a person’s contacts and alert people they might have infected. They answer questions that a COVID-19 patient might have. They help explain warning signs of complications. They help people brainstorm how to get groceries so they can properly isolate at home.

Their work also ensures that Idaho stays on top of where COVID-19 is spreading — and how quickly.

With contact tracing backlogged, Idaho’s reported case numbers are lower than reality.

Here’s why: If a person tests positive, that case will show up in the state’s data because of a lab report. But what if their entire household is sick with COVID-19 symptoms? Unless every person in the home gets a COVID-19 test, those “probable” cases will not show up in the data until a contact tracer talks to Patient Zero — and only if the patient answers the phone and cooperates.

“That’s one of the big fall-downs of not being able to keep up with contact tracing,” Atkins said. “We’re not going to see all the (probable cases) if we’re not doing contact tracing.”

Central District Health had logged 23,343 test-confirmed cases and 3,693 probable cases of COVID-19 in Ada County as of Thursday.

And when contact tracers can’t keep up with phone calls, it means that Idaho’s epidemiologists can’t get a firm handle on where and how the virus is spreading.

Since the start of the pandemic, one of the main places people catch the virus is at home, from family members or housemates. But as the coronavirus rages through Idaho, more people are catching it out in the community and bringing it home, where they hatch mini-outbreaks.

Primary Health Medical Group has done nearly 60,000 tests for COVID-19 at its clinics in the Treasure Valley.

Dr. David Peterman, CEO of Primary Health Medical Group PROVIDED BY PRIMARY HEALTH MEDICAL GROUP

Clinical staff follow up with patients, and 35% to 45% “don’t know where they got (the virus) from,” Primary Health CEO Dr. David Peterman said in November. “When they do report contacts … they report to us businesses, bars, restaurants, other gatherings and not just family gatherings.”

Some patients are catching it at work, he said.

That means Idaho needs to take more measures to contain the virus out in public, which will in turn prevent outbreaks from families and small gatherings, he said.

“We’re not saying family gatherings are OK,” he said. “What we’re saying is, this is a bigger problem. And family gatherings are a part of the problem. … But where we are today, it’s everywhere, and we’re getting it everywhere, (so) we have to be careful and cautious everywhere.”

NINE MONTHS IN, IDAHO WOEFULLY SHORT OF CONTACT TRACERS

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a community may need anywhere from dozens to thousands of contact tracers for every 100,000 residents, according to models using a tool for public health agencies.

A controlled outbreak with patients who cooperate and use apps or email to check in daily? That takes fewer contact tracers to keep up with cases. A higher rate of spread among residents who continue to socialize and don’t talk to contact tracers? That takes a lot more staff.

Based on that model’s estimates, Twin Falls County may have needed more than 3,000 contact tracers in mid-November, to successfully keep up with the coronavirus cases in that county alone. The health district had 20 people on its contact tracing team — for that county and seven others.

The 15 investigators and five contact tracers at South Central were maxed out the week of Nov. 13, when the Statesman visited their offices.

They were recording 1,000 new cases and conducting 400 investigations a week for the eight counties covered by the South Central Public Health District. The number of new cases in the district was so high and sustained that investigators were pulled from calls just to help create new case files.

“We literally came in one day and we were fine, we were doing great,” Marcellus said. “And then we came in the next and our cases were doubled. And then it just kept trending upwards.”

Investigators like Marcellus usually spend about 45 minutes on the phone with each person, collecting information for a list of the patient’s contacts who could have contracted the virus. Then, a contact-tracer will take that list and call the patient’s close contacts, tracking who might have been exposed and should be told to quarantine or take a COVID-19 test.

But high case counts mean some positive cases might not receive a call from the health district for more than a week after their test result. And as investigators are forced to triage their investigations, some close contacts might not know they’ve been exposed to someone with coronavirus until it’s too late to keep them from spreading the virus.

Right now, Idaho’s overwhelmed contact-tracing teams are prioritizing cases among older people or school-aged children, in an attempt to slow outbreaks in places like nursing homes and schools.

The teams may be one or two weeks behind on other cases, such as employees of large businesses or food processing plants, which means they rely on company HR departments to be proactive and alert health officials. That also means employees have to rely on the trust and goodwill of their employers to give them paid time off to quarantine, without official proof that they have been exposed to coronavirus.

“If (we) haven’t investigated the case they’re a part of, we can’t provide that letter to their employer confirming they are a close contact of someone who tested positive,” said Brianna Bodily, the district’s spokesperson said.

DEALING WITH IDAHOANS WHO DON’T WANT TO HEAR ABOUT COVID-19

Public health districts aren’t used to being in the public spotlight, Bodily pointed out. Staff members work “invisibly” with the assumption that it will help the community in the long run, she said.

“Well, now, we’re still doing that, but with a lot of public frustration geared toward us,” Bodily said.

That is a problem statewide.

Elke Shaw-Tulloch, administrator of the state’s Public Health Division, told the Idaho Board of Health and Welfare about that in mid-November.

“People are over it. They’re being rude, they’re not answering the phone,” she said.

With so many phone calls to make, investigators like Marcellus are instructed to try to simply end a call if the person on the other line is too hostile or won’t answer questions about whom they might have exposed. Sometimes, people even give false information.

“You know, we do the best that we can to try and defuse the situation but at the end of the day, it’s not worth our investigators getting berated for one call when they have thousands more that they could be making,” Marcellus said.

A view of the South Central Public Health District in Twin Falls from earlier this year. The health district serves a large region that includes Blaine County, one of the spring’s hardest hit COVID-19 hot spots, and the Magic Valley that has experienced a major surge for months. Drew Nash DNASH@MAGICVALLEY.COM

The public still doesn’t have an accurate idea of what case investigators and contact tracers actually do, Bodily said. Physically preventing people from leaving their houses or returning to work is never going to happen in Idaho, she said. Staff just want to tell them they need to quarantine or isolate — so that they don’t accidentally spread the virus.

Case investigators and contact tracers are bound by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA. That limits what they can share with people about a patient. If a patient attended choir practice a few days before testing positive, for example, a case investigator would gather that information, so that contact tracers could notify other people who were at choir practice that they were exposed, so they can quarantine, pay attention to symptoms or get tested.

Meanwhile, public health workers are disheartened by the backlash against their efforts to keep their communities safe.

Residents and even elected officials and have turned against guidance such as wearing masks. For example, the majority of Republican state legislators were maskless in an organizational session held at the the Statehouse on Thursday. They have downplayed the seriousness of the virus and questioned whether hospitals and doctors are telling the truth about witnessing sickness and death firsthand.

“We’re doing everything we can over here, everything,” Bodily said. “Long hours, weekends, we’re sacrificing our mental, emotional and physical health, to help everybody in our community. When we see people disregard the efforts that we’re making, or simply throw them away, it makes it difficult to keep moving forward.”