By Kathy Hageman
Dickinson County Public Information coordinator
A Dickinson County Emergency Medical Services crew had a rare experience this past weekend -– they delivered a baby.
“It is one of those things you train and train on, but don’t see very often,” said Dickinson County EMS/Health Department Director John Hultgren.
While he couldn’t give any specifics about the situation due to privacy laws, Hultgren said Emergency Medical Services had been called out to transport an expectant mother to a hospital after she started having contractions.
But once the ambulance arrived, the baby already was on its way and the crew, who were both female, delivered the baby.
“Everything turned out well,” Hultgren said.
In other EMS news, Hultgren and County Administrator Brad Homman traveled to Linn, Missouri last week to pick up the county’s new ambulance. Once Ford does some work on the vehicle and it is outfitted the new ambulance will be put into service.
Homman said he had the opportunity to tour the facility and was very impressed by how workers build the ambulances from the ground up.
COVID numbers down
Hultgren said COVID-19 numbers in the county are down, although some reports may not reflect that.
One indicator used in some local media reports uses cumulative numbers starting from the day the COVID pandemic began.
“Every time there’s a new case it is going to add a number,” Hultgren said, but in actuality, local numbers are decreasing.
Fewer calls for testing are coming into the health department and during a recent meeting with Dickinson County school nurses it was reported the numbers of students and instructors who tested positive or had a close contact have dropped significantly.
County Administrator Homman said the cases are down to approximately one or two in each school district.
Outside the U.S., COVID numbers are decreasing as well. In some countries the virus has been declared an endemic. That bodes well for the United States since COVID-19 trends overseas typically are seen about two weeks earlier than here.
“Overall in the state, numbers in the last three weeks have been down,” Hultgren said. “Hopefully, that will allow us to get back into other health department stuff we’ve done in the past.”