The Macon County Board of Commissioners had a special recognition ceremony on Aug. 10 for people who helped combat the COVID-19 pandemic earlier this year by lending their efforts to the Macon County Public Health COVID-19 call center.
While COVID-19 remains a public health crisis in Macon County and beyond, local fervor over the disease began to die down this summer as vaccines became more widely disbursed. That wasn’t the case in January when the first vaccines were being released and most people didn’t know how to go about getting one. At one point, Macon County Public Health was fielding between 600 and 1,000 calls per day about how to get vaccinated, a call load so large that it was crashing the county’s phone system.
“We had people calling with questions about the vaccine who were waiting on the phone for 45 minutes and then would be cut off because the phone system would collapse,” County Manager Derek Roland said. “By Jan. 16, we had gotten that wait period down from 45 minutes to six seconds.”
The turnaround in response times was the result of the county’s call center, which had dozens of employees and volunteers working to make sure every concerned citizen in Macon County got the information they were looking for. Phil Drake donated the use of his training and education center to host the call center, as well as equipment and support staff to help run it. Volunteers also showed up to answer the phones for the five months that the call center was open, many of them county employees making the most of their spare time, even on weekends and holidays.
“[Volunteers and part-time employees] worked a total of 862.5 hours,” call center director Tammy Keezer said of the volunteer effort. “They answered over 23,000 phone calls, of which the majority were to get folks registered and scheduled for vaccines, and they also placed over 20,000 calls for appointment reminders and answering any questions of those that were on the wait list.”
In addition to the group recognitions, there was also a Community Hero Award presented to call center worker Frances Ledford. On April 28, Ledford called an 82-year-old Macon County resident who had missed her appointment for her second vaccine dose to see if everything was OK. She could tell the resident sounded unwell and, despite her insistence that she was fine, Ledford informed her supervisor and got in touch with the resident’s family. Later that night, it became clear that Ledford’s initiative had saved the woman’s life during a medical emergency.
“Everybody played an important role, but somebody stood out during this event, and we wanted to take the time to recognize her,” sheriff Robert Holland said.
Ledford was happy to help, but she said she couldn’t have done it without help from other workers. In a time of public crisis that took a huge community effort to fight back against, this was one more way in which teamwork made all the difference.
“It was a group effort,” Ledford said. “I feel like we all worked together to help this lady and I’m so glad that we did.”