Park County’s second case of COVID-19 was detected at Powell Valley Healthcare on Monday, health officials say.“The patient was not hospitalized, but is quarantined at home,” Park …
This item is available in full to subscribers.
The Powell Tribune has expanded its online content. To continue reading, you will need to either log in to your subscriber account, or purchase a subscription.
If you are a current print subscriber, you can set up a free web account by clicking here.
If you already have a web account, but need to reset it, you can do so by clicking here.
If you would like to purchase a subscription click here.
Please log in to continue |
|
Park County’s second case of COVID-19 was detected at Powell Valley Healthcare on Monday, health officials say.
“The patient was not hospitalized, but is quarantined at home,” Park County Health Officer Dr. Aaron Billin said in a Facebook post. “This case appears to have been imported from out of state.”
The woman had recently visited a relative who tested positive for the disease, said Park County Public Nurse Manager Bill Crampton, and she began feeling ill not long after arriving home.
Crampton said that preliminary contact tracing indicates that she came straight home from the trip and, outside of a passenger in her vehicle, had no contact with other local residents.
Monday’s positive test at Powell Valley Healthcare came from a rapid testing machine and material has been sent to the Wyoming Public Health Laboratory to confirm the results.
Assuming the results are confirmed, “it’s an area of concern that we’re going to watch closely,” Crampton said. “And for me, the bigger concern I have is this just demonstrates to the community that we need to be cautious and follow the precautions as they’ve been outlined, because we see what having travelers coming in is going to do for us.”
Up until Monday, Park County had not had a confirmed case since March 17, when a Cody woman tested positive; the woman, an employee at Cody Regional Health, went on to make a full recovery. Further, samples collected from the City of Cody’s sewage on April 28 found no trace of COVID-19, according to recently released results.
Billin said the data “that we have been very successful in our local public health efforts.”
The situation has been changing as state officials have begun relaxing their public health orders in recent days and weeks. Tourists are starting to arrive in Park County as well, with Yellowstone National Park’s East and South entrances reopening on Monday.
Crampton asked business owners, residents and visitors to the area to adhere to public health recommendations about masks, gloves and frequent hand washing. He also said that anyone who is ill “should not go out in the public during this time.”
The woman who was tested at Powell Valley Healthcare’s respiratory clinic on Monday went home to self-quarantine, “just following the typical protocol,” said PVHC spokesman Jim Cannon.
PVHC’s respiratory clinic was specifically set up to screen potential cases of COVID-19 in an effort to keep the novel coronavirus from spreading to other areas of the campus, Cannon said; staffers at the clinic wear personal protective equipment like masks to protect themselves.
“We were definitely ready; we've done a lot of preparation,” Cannon said of the first case at PVHC, adding, “We were anticipating that we would eventually … have somebody test [positive] for it.”
Since the start of the pandemic, about 65 Powell Valley Healthcare patients have been tested, after medical providers suspected they might have the disease. However, until Monday, all of the samples run through the hospital’s Abbott ID NOW rapid testing machine or processed at outside labs had come back negative.