St. Joe-Benton Harbor News

The St. Joseph County emergency management director updated policymakers in April about how the region is dealing with the COVID-19 outbreak. 

The focus, Emergency Services Director Erin Goff said, continues to be in areas like food accessibility, providing protective gear for health care workers and helping the more vulnerable populations. 

“From the emergency-operations-center perspective, our operational objectives continue to be food and volunteers, personal-protective equipment for first-responders and health care workers and outreach to vulnerable populations," Goff said, according to the Sturgis Journal. 

The local agency is also working with the United Way of St. Joseph County, Goff said, according to the Sturgis Journal, to address finding more volunteers and food distribution. United Way of St. Joseph County is leading drive-thru food distribution events two to three times per week.

“The United Way reports approximately 1,300 food boxes are being distributed during that time, and that doesn’t even include what the schools are doing, which is just an astronomical amount of food that’s being put out there,” Goff said, according to the Sturgis Journal. “I’ve had quite a few donations ... I’ve  been absolutely blown away by the generosity of industry and the public  here.”

Donations of personal protective equipment have been able to be delivered to areas that need it most.

“We continue our outreach to vulnerable populations, specifically for emergency sheltering for homeless and displaced people who maybe don’t have another place to go if someone in their family gets sick or perhaps if they get sick and they don’t have anywhere to self-isolate or self-quarantine,” Goff said, according to the Sturgis Journal.

Goff said she is grateful to all the volunteers and all those who have donated goods. 

“The communities, the villages and everyone has really been working together very hard and I’m very grateful to everyone because we have received so many donations and they’re really going to where they need to be,” she said, according to the Sturgis Journal. “That includes everything from hand sanitizer to the cloth masks that people have made. We’ve made every effort to get those  to where they need to be.”