A 24th Jefferson County resident died from COVID, the disease caused by the coronavirus, last fall, but the death was announced months later at a time when cases in the county are again on the rise after dropping to nearly zero this spring.
The death was the third COVID death announced in the county in 2022, following a rash of 15 deaths in the county that began in late summer 2021 and continued through the fall and early winter. This death occurred “at the end of November,” according to Jefferson County Public Health Supervisor Pam Hanna, which places the death in the midst of last fall and winter’s surge, and makes it the 16th death of an already deadly season.
On Thursday, the Jefferson County Health Department announced in a Facebook post that “this death was identified during a routine death reconciliation,” but the department did not specify when the death occurred. The department previously announced the 22nd COVID death in the county in a Facebook post on Jan. 7, and the 23rd death appeared in a weekly release of case counts on Feb. 7.
In a phone call on Thursday, Hanna explained: “What happens is, periodically, we have to reconcile any epidemiology,” whether it’s COVID or any other communicable disease, “and so when we got the last data from the state, there was a case in there that we were not aware of, and that was this person. And so we’ve done due diligence to make sure that the person did die of COVID, did live in our jurisdiction, because we went through death records and everything.”
At least 15 county residents were already reported to have died from COVID between late August 2021 and early February 2022—a span of little more than five months that was the deadliest timeframe for the virus in the county so far.
The department did not release any further information about the 24th death, such as the age, gender or vaccination status of the person who died, but the department stated in a Dec. 8, 2021, announcement of other COVID deaths that “the majority of individuals who are most seriously ill and hospitalized are unvaccinated.”
Molly Carey, the department’s clinic coordinator, told The Monitor after the county’s ninth COVID death that “we don’t release any information other than Jefferson County had a COVID-19 related death. This is out of respect to the individual’s loved ones.”
The department announced the county’s ninth COVID death on Aug. 27, 2021. At that time, the county reported 17 active cases and one hospitalization, and an increase of 11 new cases in the preceding three days. The department announced the county’s 10th death on Oct. 8, at which time the county reported 76 active cases, four hospitalizations and 51 new cases since three days prior.
The department announced five more deaths during the first nine days of November, and it announced five more deaths in early December. It announced another death on Dec. 21, before announcing the 22nd death on Jan. 7.
When it tallied the 23rd death on Feb. 7, the department reported 84 active cases and 88 new recorded cases since Jan. 31. That report did not list the number of residents hospitalized with COVID, but it did state that eight residential facilities in the county had active cases.
By early March, the number of active cases in the county dropped to nearly zero, and the department’s weekly reports tallied just one, two or three active cases at a time through early May.
But on Monday, May 30, the department tallied 12 cases active on that day and an increase of 24 new cases reported over the past week—an uptick after a two-month lull, but far short of previous surges in the county.
“The other thing that is concerning to me is we’ve got some of our long-term, some of our residential facilities with cases again,” Hanna said on Thursday, noting that residents in such facilities are particularly susceptible to more severe illness or death. “It’s not a happy thing right now, we’re wanting to do other public health work.”
The county saw its first COVID death on Nov. 30, 2020.
Jefferson County, Montana and the United States experienced a surge in coronavirus infections and COVID deaths beginning mid-summer 2021 and continuing through the early fall, driven primarily by infections and deaths among the unvaccinated, though case numbers in Jefferson County and Montana receded into early winter. Trends in COVID deaths generally lag behind trends in the number of new infections. The surge in cases and deaths has lopsidedly affected areas with lower vaccination rates, including many rural areas of the nation, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Cases again spiked last winter, exceeding previous winter’s peak and far exceeding the fall, because of the omicron variant of the coronavirus.
