The Enterprise Ledger
BY KEN ROGERS krogers@dothaneagle.com
Mar 18, 2020
Coffee County EMA Director James Brown was happy to report
good news that no cases of the COVID-19 coronavirus have been
confirmed in Coffee County. He also had to deliver the bad news in an update to the Enterprise
City Council.
“We’re just waiting for it to happen here, unfortunately,” Brown
said at Tuesday night’s meeting. “I think it’s a matter if ‘when’ rather than ‘if.’”
When that happens, Brown detailed some of the measures that
likely will be taken here. He noted the lead agency on this is the
Alabama Department of Public Health. Nationally, the Department
of Health and Human Services (HHS) is over the crisis.
“Working together with HHS, ADPH will direct what happens in
the state as far as restricting anybody from travel, from
quarantining people, things like that,” Brown said.
“When we get into emergency powers — that the President just
gave — that gives us a little more freedom in what happens and
what we can do. If we get to the point where we have a case in
Coffee County or in Enterprise, we would probably recommend
that we also declare a local state of emergency.
“That would allow us to close public buildings. We would not,
however, have the ability to close down businesses. We would not
have the ability to restrict gatherings of whatever number. Those
are all left to the Alabama Department of Public Health and Dr.
(Scott) Harris, who is the director of that. Dr. Harris would look at
our area and decide what things he needed to restrict in order to
keep people from passing on this virus.”
Brown explained the phrase “flattening the curve” and its goal.
“What we’re trying to do is prevent a big spike in cases and that
way we don’t want to be overpowered from the medical system so
we can still treat everybody that we need to,” the EMA director
said. “If we had all the cases at one time, we would be
overwhelmed. If you take the typical 1 percent rate of mortality
and about a 2 percent rate of being hospitalized, and you just
figure out if we had 40 percent of our population affected it would
overwhelm our system.
“What we’re trying to do by using social distancing, by using
hygiene, by using all these things that you’ve been hearing about
on the news, we’re trying to ‘flatten out’ that spike so we get
infected over a longer period of time and everybody isn’t infected
all at once. That’s why we closed the schools, that’s why we’re
doing things like this.”
Brown outlined some of the more aggressive measures that have
already been implemented in the northern part of Alabama, where
most of that state’s positive cases have been confirmed.
“Those restrictions are no gatherings of 25 persons or more unless
they can maintain a six-foot distance from each other. They have
closed all the senior centers. They’re still allowing curbside
delivery and pickup of food for that,” Brown began. “They’ve
closed all private schools, all preschools with more than 12
children. They’ve closed any visitors and non-essential health
personnel to all the nursing homes.
“They’ve closed all the restaurants, bars, breweries, etc., except
for curbside takeout — but that’s all. So that’s some of the powers
that are given to the health officer and he’s able to make these
decisions.
“If we have a case down here or get more than one case we would
expect these same type of restrictions to come on us. Again, that
would be at the total discretion of the health department. The part
that we would be responsible for would be closing the public
buildings.”
Senior citizens have been most vulnerable to the virus. Tougher
visitation policies at hospitals and nursing homes have been
implemented.
Brown also said out-of-state travel should be cut as much as
possible.
Even religious services have been affected. Again, the six-feet
distance rule should be observed as much as possible.
Brown said one concern he has now is the limit on personal
protective equipment (PPE).
“That’s primarily for our health care workers and for our EMS
personnel and some of our firefighters go to those areas,” he said.
“We’re trying to find as many masks as we can. HHS has ordered
500 million of them, so hopefully we’ll start getting some of those
soon. Right now we are pretty low.
“We have requested the activation of what we call the Strategic
National Stockpile. That’s a federal government thing that keeps a
stockpile of medical equipment. They are going to move some of
that into here so that we can fill up our supplies where areas are
low. There is going to be, however, a priority with that. The first
one is acute area in hospitals. The second one is nursing homes.
The third one is ADPH because they are getting ready to do
collections. So we will be starting tests pretty soon. The final one
is our EMA personnel.”
Brown said EMA is looking into steps that would make having to
go into some public buildings not necessary.
“We’re looking at allowing expired carry permits, drivers licenses
and tags so people don’t have to go in and get them renewed at the
DMV,” he said. “We’re going to see what we can do to do more of
it by mail and waive some of the fees that come with that.”
What’s next? Brown said EMA has worked with the Alabama
Hospital Association.
“We think by next week for sure we’re going to have 20 collection
sites around the state for testing,” he said. “Testing is one of the
most important things that we can do. Before, it was limited
because we didn’t have many tests. We still have to report
anything that comes in as a positive result, but we don’t have to
jump through as many hoops in order to get testing done.
“We’re hoping soon we’ll be able to test more individuals. How
that will be done should be coming out soon.”
Brown said of the 20 collection sites, two will be in the Wiregrass
first — in Houston County and Pike County.
“They’re talking about opening a third. It’ll probably be in Coffee
County, but I can’t guarantee that,” Brown said. “They’re looking
at doing some drive-through testing so you can pull up in your car,
you don’t have to get out and they can test you.”
He added that two private companies in the county are performing
tests, but didn’t name them.
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