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County plants flowers in honor of residents lost to COVID-19

PICKENS — Flowers that will bloom every spring at the Pickens County administration building are intended as a reminder of the more than 200 Pickens County residents who have died of COVID-19.

County administrator Ken Roper discussed the flowers during a Facebook Live update posted Friday morning.

“COVID is still a thing, folks,” Roper said. “I know that we’re all tired of it.”

Roper had been doing weekly or biweekly Facebook Live updates throughout the pandemic.

“And then I stopped because I ran out of good things to tell you and I felt like we were all doing what we reasonably could here locally,” he said.

March 20 marked the one-year anniversary of the county’s first COVID-19 case, Roper said.

“Things are starting to open back up a little bit,” he said. “Vaccine deployment is growing. Testing capability is out there. People are used to wearing masks when appropriate, but we’ve got to be careful and we’ve got to be smart about the way we reintroduce ourselves and each other to kind of a new regular life. We’re hopeful that the vaccine is going to help us with all that.”

The county’s COVID numbers “have started coming back down,” Roper said.

“Our numbers climbed over the holidays to where we had over 2,500 active cases in Pickens County

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