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A two-year state of emergency came to an end Tuesday morning, as the Marshall County Commission voted to end the declaration which was initially made March 23, 2020 in response to the then-new COVID-19 pandemic.
Commission president John Gruzinskas said the decision to end the declaration came with the advice of Tom Hart and Tom Cook, the heads of the county Office of Emergency Management and Health Department, respectively. The commission terminated the declaration Tuesday morning, though Gruzinskas pointed out that the COVID services provided by the county, such as vaccinations and testing, would continue.
"The only thing we terminated was the state of emergency declaration," he said. "We're going to still wind down, as the cases wind down. The health department is still going to test, as long as they have vaccinations they'll still be doing that."
Gruzinskas added that ending the state of emergency wouldn't affect how the county's offices operate. Rather, the end to the declaration signals a shift in attitudes from the heydays of large, county-wide vaccination clinics.
"We're beyond when we had those huge clinics at the fairground," he said. "We're beyond that point, and our cases are diminishing, thank God. The cases that are actually being hospitalized are also diminishing. We listened to the experts."
Gruzinskas said the benefit to having a declared state of emergency was that the county could be reimbursed by the federal government for funds used in certain ways related to the pandemic, such as overtime pay for county employees or specialized equipment.
"We don't need to be in this (state), and most declarations have a terminal end," Gruzinskas said. "When we have flooding or snowstorms, they have an end. With this state of emergency, it didn't have one. We were all in brand-new turf, no one knew what was going to happen next, so we had to feel our way along just like everyone else."