https://www.dothaneagle.com/enterprise_ledger/news/covid-19-cases-rising-but-not-spiking-in-coffee-county/article_5c3993cb-2fd1-54e2-b056-
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BY KEN ROGERS krogers@dothaneagle.com
May 30, 2020
COVID-19 cases are still rising in Coffee County, but not at a rate that has
alarmed EMA Director James Brown.
As of Friday afternoon, 224 people here have tested positive for the virus
that grew into a pandemic in the past five months world-wide and the past
three months in Alabama.
That’s not the number Brown is looking at. He’s more focused on the
number of active cases.
“Our numbers of active cases are still in the same range,” Brown said. “So
as new people are coming on, others are coming off. When you look at the
220 or whatever it’s sitting it, it looks bad. But when 160-something of them
have come off …
“When I would be concerned is when the active cases start to spike, because
that would mean we’d have to hospitalize more people, possibly. That was
our whole thing behind flattening the curve. We wanted to lower that peak.
As long as we don’t start peaking again, we’ll be good. Right now I’m not
overly concerned.”
On Friday afternoon, the state’s dashboard data on the coronavirus listed
Coffee County having 62 new cases in the last 14 days. Of course, the
number of tests given — both across the state and in the county — has
jumped considerably. More than one-third of the total tests given in the
county have taken place in the past two weeks. Those 62 new cases came
out of 611 tests here in the past 14 days.
In Alabama, the number of positive cases has been 16,823 in 208,883 total
tests. In the past two weeks, 5,461 positive cases resulted from 74,118 total
tests.
There has been one death attributed to the virus in Coffee County. In
Alabama, that number is 605. The total number of hospitalizations in the
state is 1,783 as of Friday afternoon. That number doesn’t include the
number of active hospitalizations, which is considerably less.
Overall, 1,766 people in Coffee County have been tested with 224 positive
cases.
“If you look, up until May we only had one testing site put up by ADPH in
the county,” Brown said. “Now we have twice a week where we’re testing in
Coffee County. That’s a good thing. That does account for some of the rise
in numbers, but not all of it.”
The county EMA director said the guidelines issued at the outbreak of the
pandemic will help now. He said more positive tests were expected when the
economy started to reopen this month.
“The thing we need to do is have everybody still try to do social distancing
as much as possible,” he said. “Wear masks when you can. No handshakes.
All the things we’ve told everybody to do. We have to keep maintaining that
so we don’t get those spikes.”
Enterprise Ledger Photo: James Brown