The first positive case of COVID-19 was confirmed in Guthrie County this week, but Adair and Guthrie County Emergency Management along with partnering agencies have long been preparing for the virus’ eventual arrival.

Coordinator Bob Kempf says his agency has been meeting with both counties’ hospitals and public health departments since the end of January, which is the same time they started ordering personal protective equipment and reviewing the counties’ pandemic plan, “We didn’t start doing this and talking about this on the 9th of March when the governor had done her first proclamation. We had already been working on it for over a month just preparing, making sure we had our ducks in a row. We have received personal protective equipment from the state through the national stockpile here in Guthrie County and Adair County. We have received things which we are sharing with all those partners, we have things that are coming in that we ordered every day, we just received another shipment actually this morning, of stuff that was actually ordered the first week of March.”

Amid concerns of a lack of ventilators and COVID-19 testing kits across the nation, Kempf says if a case was extreme enough for the patient to need a ventilator they would likely be treated in Des Moines, not citing a lack of proficiency on rural hospital staff but because the metro hospitals have more staff that will be able to focus entirely on their recovery. He adds that they are following the State Hygienic Laboratory’s criteria on who to test for COVID-19. For more information on Adair and Guthrie counties’ COVID-19 response, visit here.