The situation may not be dire, but parents of school children will be encouraged to have their children wear masks while in school, and community religious leaders will be asked to encourage masking during church services.
“We had 519 new (COVID) from Friday,” Kim Tedford said, “We’re up 98 (Wednesday). That puts us a little over 2,000 active cases in the community counting the unknowns – and remember the unknowns are the ones we have not been able to get in touch with as far as contact tracing.”
Kim Tedford, the regional health director of the Jackson-Madison County Regional Health Department, made her comments during the weekly COVID-19 media briefing that included city, county, and community leaders.
“Our total number of deaths are up to 250 … over the last seven days we’ve been averaging a little over 105 new cases a day,” Tedford said, “We actually hit a new record at the end of December (2020).
” … 174 was probably our highest day and we surpassed that this past week with 184 on the 16th of August.”
Tedford also mentioned concern about the spread of the virus in the county.
“We have so much community spread amongst our community and in our county,” Tedford said, “Our vaccination rates are better – we’ve got a little over, almost 58.6 percent of the population in Madison County that have received at least one dose of the vaccine, and about 49.1 percent of the population who have completed their vaccination series.”
The news was not a lot better a few blocks away at Jackson-Madison County General Hospital.
“We had 583 patients this morning at the hospital,” said Amy Garner, “185 are COVID patients … our previous record was 155 in December (2020) or January, and now we’ve exceeded that every single day.
“We are admitting twice as many COVID patients as we are discharging and that trejectory can not continue.
Garner – West Tennessee Healthcare system vice president chief compliance & communications officer – said 77 ventilators were running Wednesday morning.
“A record,” Garner said, “Our staff is limited, struggling. They are doing all they can do to keep up with the demand.”
(PHOTO: Amy Garner – West Tennessee Healthcare system vice president chief compliance & communications officer)
