Lee Harris, Shelby County mayor, spoke at a noon media briefing today (5.8.20) and said he believes solid progress has been made on indicators of success regarding COVID-19, but there is more to do. He outlined four fronts including an expansion of public health capacity at an estimated cost of $10 million.
“We intend to bring a proposal for a massive expansion to the County Commission on this Wednesday,” said the Mayor. The proposal will include upwards of 140 full-time temporary employees to do the work of the coordinated COVID response and efforts to reduce spread. Another highlight of that proposal is an allocation for wrap-round services for those isolated and quarantined individuals. Services could include hotel stays, three meals a day and a path for income support.
Also requested will be monies to hire several new nurses to do testing as part of the Health Department regular duties. And, he said, the Health Department will hire dozens and dozens of individuals to perform the investigations and contact tracing.
Asked about a price tag for the total expansion package, Mayor Harris said it is approximately $10 million and he will go to the Shelby County Commission for the first $6.3 million Wednesday. The line-by-line details will be revealed in that presentation.
The other indicators of success mentioned by Mayor Harris:
“So one of our indicators of success in the Back-to-Business plan is testing capacity and you have seen a substantial expansion of our testing capacity.” He said there is an upward trajectory with an average of 1,151 test results per day in the most recent period reported. Since the pandemic started he said, the average tests per day has been 780-790.
A second indicator Mayor Harris mentioned was hospital capacity. For acute care beds, 73% are utilized, 28% are available, status yellow. For ICU beds, 76% are utilized, 24% are available, status red.
“As our third indicator of success, it’s the COVID case data. I would just like to remind all of you that our downward trajectory that we would like to see is an analysis. It’s not the raw count or the raw number. For example, one of the great measures with respect to this item is the ratio of confirmed cases to the number of tests. That’s our positivity rate. With that rate we have seen some stabilization.”
