During a noon briefing today (7.3.20), Shelby County Health Department (SCHD) officials said masks will be required in public for anyone over 2 years old.
Dr. Bruce Randolph, SCHD health officer, said the positivity rate has been running 10-10.3%. It was about 4.5% in May and has been as high as 15% recently.
Dr. Alisa Haushalter, SCHD director, said the opinion to require masks is an evolving legal opinion. In addition, she said, Memphis and Nashville are now requiring masks. She added the Health Department has the authority to require masks throughout the County.
Dr. Randolph said the Health Department wants to get ahead of the game.
From Commissioner Wesley Wright who “sits in” for Tuesday/Friday briefings of the Memphis Shelby Joint Task Force, mayors from throughout Shelby County and administrative and elected officials from the region. His report for today:
While the July 4th weekend fast approaches, Dr Jain had the most appropriate phrase on the call, “We should not be alarmed but aware.” A CDC rep was on the call as well. Shelby County is at the highest positivity rate observed during the epidemic. The R naught (R0) still holding at 1.12, the mortality rate has fallen below 2%, now 1.8% and our hospitals are still status yellow for Acute Care and ICU. There were 282 hospitalized last night with COVID-19. While this is the largest slide show in the over 100 days since the beginning of the Joint Task Force, we have gained much knowledge yet we have much more to learn.
The high rate of infections are occurring in certain areas of Shelby County and thus are skewing (distorting) the numbers for the rest of our area. The most important data point is hospital capacity.
Notes from today:
– Shelby County with 11,044 cases, 194 deaths, 1.8% mortality, and 8.2% positivity rate.
– R naught still hovering around 1.12
– Acute Care and ICU status Yellow
CDC special guests
– Broad adoption on preventive measures is critical – SCHD
– Most “probables” are death certificate verified (see chart)
– Test sites are now highly utilized
– Middle portion of the county highest case rates (see chart)
– Joint command in DC looked at counties with concern. This task force has “done a great job with the data.” CDC
– Tennessee in general has not taken all the preventive measures that other states have taken: CDC
– Changing the social norms will be done through engagement of social media
– People are embarrassed to wear masks if they don’t see others wearing them
– We need to greatly expand the number of tests per site, place more sites in highly impacted areas
– Predicted 50% to 100% increase in hospitalization capacity in the next few weeks
– Dr Jain communities with lowest rates of wearing masks have higher rate of cases. correlation ?
– Latino community more severely impacted than any other
– Dr Warren talks Latino Memphis intervention
– When are demographics updated ? Sporadic, weekly sometimes
– “When are we going to close the bars ?” a comment during the JTF meeting
– CDC does not recommend pooling for symptomatics
– Some frustration from hospital reps on changes of testing protocol/contracts. Being addressed by the Joint Task Force lead.
– Dr. Ted Horrell, Shelby County Schools considering a later start, municipal schools still plan on August 10th with many precautions.
– A number of challenges including but not limited to increase in positivity rates and hospital utilization
