More staff will soon be added to the Deschutes County public health division to help bolster the county’s response to COVID-19.

The Deschutes County Commission voted unanimously Monday to add two public health nurses, a public information officer, two administrative positions and a part-time health officer position and a part-time health educator position. All but the health officer position would be for 18 months.

The additional positions came at the request of the health services division. Nahad Sadr-Azodi, the county’s deputy director of public health, said Monday the department needed to add more positions to handle what he called an “unprecedented” surge in COVID-19 cases since Labor Day weekend.

Since March, many on the staff — especially the public health nurses — have been doing double work loads, Sadr-Azodi said. Staffers have been responding to COVID-19 while also keeping up with the work they had before the pandemic, such as tracking sexually transmitted infections and other programs.

“We are facing multiple priorities and we must address them simultaneously,” he said.

The county has mostly kept up with the workload by redistributing existing staff members and using temporary employees for contract tracing, Sadr-Azodi said.

“However at this point, the scope of work has expanded past our internal reorganization,” he said.

According to a memo to commissioners, three employees — Jill Johnson, the county’s communicable disease supervisor, and two public health nurses — are in particular working “extraordinary hours without an apparent end in sight.”

“Of particular concern is that the response system lacks adequate redundancy. If any of the mentioned staff were to take leave, separate and/or get sick, we would face consequential vulnerabilities with potentially negative impacts on the quality and timeliness of our work,” the memo stated.

Sadr-Azodi said hiring someone to be a full-time public information officer is also important, especially as the county gets closer to having to handle communication around vaccine distribution for COVID-19. The acting information officer, Morgan Emerson, stepped into the role at the beginning of the pandemic but was actually hired to be the county’s emergency preparedness coordinator.

“Our department will be front and center when addressing this issue and issues around vaccine hesitancy, which may arise,” Sadr-Azodi said.

Hiring these positions will cost about $1 million over the course of 18 months, according to a county memo.

Half of that will be paid for using county money that was already allotted into the budget for communicable diseases, said Cheryl Smallman, a business manager in the health services department. The other half will be funded through state money and money from the Central Oregon Health Council, she said.

The goal is to have people hired by Jan. 1, Sadr-Azodi said.