ROCHELLE — Rochelle Community Hospital CEO Gregg Olson said Monday that the hospital is now seeing less COVID-19 activity after a high point last month. 

Last week, RCH administered 138 COVID-19 tests after being up near 300 per week a few times last month, Olson said. Of the 138 tests last week, 35 were positive (25.4 percent), he said. 

As of Monday, Ogle County was at 8.73 percent COVID-19 positivity with 317.91 cases per 100,000. The Omicron variant is now the prevalent variant in the county, Olson said. He estimates 60 percent of the cases are Omicron and the Delta variant is now in the minority. RCH has seen a steady small number of inpatients with COVID-19. 

“We’re still seeing some COVID-19 inpatient activity,” Olson said. “We have 2-3 in the hospital a day and it’s been fairly consistent. We did have an uptick to 5-6 at one point recently, but now it’s been falling and it’s around 2-3.”

The spread of COVID-19 slowing has helped RCH, especially in its lab services department where testing is done. Last month while overwhelmed by people seeking tests, the hospital faced a lack of testing supplies and got close to running out, which made operating difficult. 

RCH did get some last minute supplies, but had to send some tests away to be evaluated rather than doing them in-house.

”As numbers have gone down, it’s become more manageable,” Olson said. 

Last month, RCH closed its cafeteria to the public as a COVID-19 precaution. It also limited its visitor restrictions to one designated visitor for patients in the emergency department or on the medical/surgical floor including the ICU. Only one person is allowed to accompany a patient to same day surgery, convenient care, the multi-specialty clinic or family healthcare clinic. 

Olson said those measures remain in place, but conversations are ongoing about relaxing those restrictions if numbers continue to move in the right direction. All of the rest of RCH’s services are fully operational.

The state’s plan to remove its indoor masking mandate will not change anything at RCH, as it is exempt as a healthcare facility. 

“We’ll continue to mask and use all of the precautions we can until things change significantly,” Olson said. “And we can’t project when that might be.”

On Jan. 21, Olson released a message to the public addressing the high COVID-19 activity at the time and “unacceptable behavior”  from a few members of the community that were disorderly with staff in COVID-19 operations.

The release said staff endured being yelled at, sworn at and were met with physical aggression at times. Olson said RCH would not tolerate that behavior and asked the community to be respectful and kind.

On Monday and weeks later, Olson called the situation unfortunate and said it was hard to put that message out due to very few people being the ones that caused the problems. 

“We had people who didn’t like wearing masks or the testing process,” Olson said. “Our employees were just doing their job. We had a couple of situations. I thought before it got out of control, I should put that messaging out. It caught the public’s attention and we haven’t had any more situations like that that I know of. It’s too bad that a few people caused something like that.”

Supporting staff members played a large role in the statement at the time, Olson said. 

“Our staff is our greatest asset,” Olson said. “We have to support them, especially because of how they’ve been on the front lines for the past two years putting their own health at risk to help others.”

While the COVID-19 situation in the community has improved, Olson said he’s still nervous about the situation after the pandemic has worsened to new heights in the past following promising improvements. 

He stressed that the community should still proceed carefully despite less COVID-19 activity recently. 

“I wish I had a crystal ball,” Olson said. “But I don’t. I feel like we’ve turned a corner and I want to continue along this pathway. I know the community is tired of COVID-19 and so are we. But I don’t want to do too much too fast. My message is we just have to be careful. Hopefully there are brighter things in our future. But we can’t do things too quickly just because we’re tired of COVID-19.”