Nashville will remain in its modified Phase 2 reopening for the “foreseeable future,” health officials said Tuesday, after announcing the city’s highest new infection day with 771 new confirmed cases of COVID-19.
The bars, ordered to close for at least 14 days on July 3, will remain closed until at least July 31.
“We will stay in this phase for the foreseeable future,” said Dr. Alex Jahangir, head of the city’s coronavirus workforce, calling on the public to follow the Metro mask mandate to curb the spread of the virus.
“It can help you and your friends and family. And if those facts don’t convince you, think about the economy,” said Jahangir. “Not taking precautions like wearing a mask puts our economy at risk. The faster we have this virus under control, the faster we can open up our economy.”
The city also said Tuesday that the Metro Health Department has issued 48 civil arrest warrants to companies in which employees were not complying with the city’s mask order. The total does not include citations issued by the Metro police.
Nashville’s record for new cases, a positive testing rate of 17% in Tuesday’s report, follows a record for new infections in Tennessee. Health officials reported 3,312 new cases Monday, the highest daily total in the state.
“The numbers we are seeing make it clear that we will not be able to abandon our modified Phase 2,” Mayor John Cooper said Tuesday during the city’s health briefing. “We need to flatten the curve. That requires compliance with health protocols.”
When asked if the data does not indicate that the city should impose more restrictions or go back to an earlier phase, Jahangir challenged the public to think differently about what a reversal would look like.
Officials, he said, have demonstrated a willingness to make the “difficult decision” to shut down a specific part of society that is attributed to the increase in cases, based on contact search work.
“We can make more strategic decisions about what’s causing a spike or groups and target those areas first to try to minimize the impact on our economy as much as possible, but also be the most effective in the decisions we make,” Jahangir said. .
When the city reverted to a modified Phase 2 on July 3, Cooper pointed to the bars as a risk of infection in the city, saying they were the source of a “record number of groups” of new cases. The bars, officials said Tuesday, will not be able to open until August.
The modified version of the second stage incorporates elements from the entire roadmap. Some of the latest restrictions, such as limiting restaurants to half their capacity, have not been in use since the city abandoned Phase 1 in late May.
Restaurants, gyms, barbershops and other “high contact businesses” will continue to operate at 50% of their normal capacity. Retail stores are limited to 75% of their capacity. The meetings have a limit of 25 people.
More contact trackers needed
There has been a positive rate of 18% among the 14,816 people tested in the city last week.
“It gives you a lot of pause, gives you a lot of concern. As we are testing more … it is to be expected that the positive rate will drop because we are testing more people who do not have it and that the virus is stable. But the virus continues to be rampant in our community, “said Jahangir.
As cases accumulate, so does the workload of the city’s contact tracking team. The outbreak is growing so fast that it has hampered testing and tracking efforts across the country. Coronavirus is emerging in many states, and most of those states rely on a small group of large laboratory companies to process millions of tests.
There are longer waits for the test results, sometimes so long that the results don’t come until after the infection has ended.
“Now that the volume of cases is increasing enormously, the work is increasing enormously,” Jahangir said, acknowledging that the city needs additional help locating contacts.
Twenty new trackers have been hired, he said, bringing the total to about 150.
Despite the challenge, the city’s key metric dashboard remains “green” for traceability. George Washington University research estimates that Nashville needs about 1,600 contact trackers to satisfy its population.
Yihyun Jeong covers politics in Nashville for USA TODAY NETWORK – TENNESSEE. Please reach out to her at [email protected] and follow her on Twitter @yihyun_jeong.
