Coronavirus cases continue to surge in North Dakota as the state recently announced new steps to help with hospital capacity and faces pressure to impose tighter restrictions.
North Dakota is now allowing health-care workers who are COVID-19-positive, but asymptomatic, to continue working in coronavirus units, Governor Doug Burgum announced on Monday, as maintaining staffing levels continues to be a challenge amid heavy patient counts.
“Our hospitals are under enormous pressure now,” Burgum said in a press release. “We can see the future two, three weeks out, and we know that we have severe constraints.”
As of Thursday morning, the state had 707 COVID-19-related deaths and 293 people in hospital because of the virus.
In an interview with Global News on Thursday, Kirby Kruger, the disease control director for North Dakota’s department of health said any health-care worker with COVID-19 must not cross paths with anyone outside their unit at work and follow strict protocols, as outlined in the Centers for Disease Control’s “strategies to mitigate healthcare personnel staffing shortages.”
“It only allows them to go to work and then to go right back home,” Kruger said. “There’s no stopping at the grocery store or the post office or anything like that.”
Every county in the state was moved to the high-risk level on Monday, which means businesses, events and gatherings are recommended to reduce occupancy to 25 per cent, with a cap of 50 people.
North of the border in Manitoba on Tuesday, where coronavirus cases have spiked in recent weeks but are still far less than the numbers in North Dakota, the province announced a weeks-long shutdown which bans social gatherings and requires non-essential businesses to close.
Also on Tuesday, Minnesota’s governor Tim Walz criticized the hands-off approach taken by North Dakota and South Dakota and pleaded with his neighbours to impose more serious restrictions, according to the Grand Forks Herald.
Dr. Misty Anderson, president of the North Dakota Medical Association, said more needs to be done in her state.
“It’s really getting out of hand,” Anderson said. “We’ve been pushing for things like a state-wide mask mandate for a long time and we feel it’s time to do that.”
Dr. Paul Carson, an infectious disease specialist and professor at North Dakota State University, believes the state should take it a step further and consider a lockdown.
“We are in a phase of exponential growth, where large blunt instruments like some version of a lockdown are needed to bend the curve,” Carson said in an email.
Kruger noted that some local counties within North Dakota have implemented mask mandates and the state will continue to support mask-wearing and review its strategy.
“We’re continuing to provide the education and continuing to push from our perspective that people should just do this because it’s the right thing to do,” Kruger said.
“We don’t remove any of our public health tools off the table completely … I think some of them are further down in terms of ever being implemented than others.”