Daugherty
By Lori McDonald | The Tribune
The Healthy Jackson County coordinator at Schneck Medical Center shared some good news about COVID-19 via Zoom on Wednesday.
“Schneck has had no COVID-19 patients within the last 10 days, so that is very exciting, and we’re happy to be moving into hopefully a post-pandemic world and recovery time,” Bethany Daugherty said.
Daugherty, who also is a registered dietitian at Schneck, said the Seymour hospital’s COVID-19 vaccine walk-in clinic that was previously held on Wednesday afternoons is no longer functioning.
COVID-19 vaccinations are available at all Schneck Primary Care practices and at some local retail clinics, the Jackson County Health Department and Indiana Health Center in Seymour.
Also Wednesday, state health officials announced the state is dropping the color-coded map that rated each county’s risk of COVID-19 spread in favor of relying on a
federal rating system.
That is one of the significant changes the Indiana State Department of Health announced for its online dashboard tracking COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations and deaths across the state. The agency has been updating the dashboard each weekday but will switch to Monday, Wednesday and Friday updates.
Indiana’s risk map was based on the number of new COVID-19 cases per capita and the percentage of tests confirming infections. The map updated last week shows 87 of the state’s 92 counties at the lowest-risk blue level after all counties were in the highest-risk red level for the last three weeks of January.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s national risk map is based on COVID-19 hospitalizations. It showed all Indiana counties at low risk levels as of Wednesday.
State Health Department Chief Medical Officer Lindsay Weaver said the dashboard update is a step toward general surveillance models, such as those used to measure current levels of influenza.
Daugherty also said during the Healthy Jackson County’s quarterly meeting that Schneck is still in a recovery phase from the cyberattack last fall, so for Healthy Jackson County correspondence, people continue to use the [email protected] email address for now as there is no estimated time as to when Schneck’s emails will be restored.
“This winter, the schneckmed.org website got a facelift and is now more user-friendly and there are mobile applications available,” she said. “That means the schneckmed.org/healthy-jackson-county website looks a little bit different, and we’re in the process of making those updates. As you can imagine with a cyberattack, it has delayed that a little bit.”
Daughtery said Schneck just recently finished the Community Health Needs Assessment, which is done every three years, and Schneck completed that in collaboration with the Indiana Rural Health Association. The final report should be ready to share in a few more months.