Tag: Penny Caudill

Sharp resigns as Monroe County health officer, Brittain appointed to post

In a one-sentence statement, Thomas Sharp has resigned his position as health officer for Monroe County, effective on April 30.

B Square file photo of Monroe County health building at Walnut and 7th streets.

The board of health has appointed Clark Brittain as the new health officer, which is pending approval by the board of county commissioners.

Based on the health department’s record of a re-appointment made in 1998, Sharp’s service as health officer started 47 years ago, in 1976.

Sharp was most recently re-appointed in November 2021.

Under state law, it’s the county health officer who  appoints the health administrator, public health nurses, environmental health specialists, computer programmers, clerks, other personnel in the health department. Continue reading “Sharp resigns as Monroe County health officer, Brittain appointed to post” →

Column: On the normalcy of local COVID-19 response

Indiana University’s director of media relations, Chuck Carney, hosted Friday’s Zoom conference call with the media.
The COVID-19 case map from the Indiana State Department of Health’s website on Sunday, March 22, 2020. The Monroe County case did not appear until Sunday after it was reported by a private lab to a local health provider, Indiana University’s student health center. The lab has to report to the state before the tally is included in the state’s dashboard.

Early Friday afternoon, Monroe County’s health administrator, Penny Caudill,
sent out a press release announcing the county’s first confirmed case of COVID-19, the pandemic virus that’s spreading across the world.

It was a student seen a week earlier by Indiana University Health Center, whose positive test was reported to the center just that morning.

The student, who lives off-campus, self-isolated for the week while the test was being processed. The student health center sent the test to LabCorp, a private lab in Burlington, North Carolina, according to the student health center’s medical director, Beth Rupp.

The COVID-19 infection that was reported on Friday appears to be a case contracted in Monroe County. Rupp told a group of reporters on a Zoom video conference call on Friday that the student had not travelled recently and had no known exposure.

Rupp confirmed that LabCorp reported the positive result to the health center on Friday morning. Rupp said her first step was to contact the patient. After that, the student health center notified Caudill, as Monroe County’s health administrator.

Caudill was a part of Friday afternoon’s press conference call, which was organized by Indiana University’s director of media relations, Chuck Carney. Continue reading “Column: On the normalcy of local COVID-19 response” →