The doubling of positive COVID-19 cases over the last month in Guthrie County has caused the local public health department to bring in reinforcements to help with contact tracing and other tasks during this pandemic.

As of Friday the Guthrie County dashboard shows that out of 735 total cases 325 of those are currently active. Public Health Director Jotham Arber says as they’ve seen around 100 cases being added weekly over the last several weeks they’ve had to shift the duties of some of the health services employees and they have hired an intern to assist with contact tracing, “I’ve got our environmental health guys calling eight hours a day, in the evening I’m taking my turn with contact tracing and also just manning the phones. It’s been a bit of a stretch, our health department has kind of been burning the candle on both ends here for awhile and we understand that that’s what we are tasked with and that’s what we do and we do it happily because we believe in trying to keep our community as safe as possible.”

Arber adds that it has been a very rough couple of months for his staff having to call 50 people in a day, with the emotional toll of impacting residents’ lives by having to tell them to quarantine. He says the department is hanging in there, but he asks the public to do what they can to limit the spread of COVID-19 by wearing a cloth face covering in public settings where social distancing is difficult to maintain, staying at least six feet away from others, and staying home when even mildly ill. You can hear more from Arber during Monday’s Let’s Talk Guthrie County program on air and at raccoonvalleyradio.com.