Nashville still isn’t ready to relaunch its economy, officials say.
For the third straight day, Metro has reported 100 or more new cases of the coronavirus. Two more elderly residents also died yesterday, bringing the local death toll to 24.
At the mayor’s Tuesday press briefing, Coronavirus Task Force Chair Alex Jahangir said the recent jump in cases has increased the rolling 14-day average of new cases to the point that the city is still hesitant to set a date to start its phased reopening.
“In medicine, when we face a challenging problem, we look at the data available to us, and we get experts around a table to figure out the best way forward,” Jahangir said. “This situation is no different. There’s not one right answer, and Mayor Cooper is evaluating the data. And he has brought together leaders in public health, medicine and business, all experts to figure out the best path forward.”
The rate at which the virus is spreading from one person to the next isn’t where officials would like it to be, either. Jahangir said the transmission rate is holding steady at one, which means each time someone gets the coronavirus, they pass it to an average of one other person. Only once the transmission rate drops below one will the outbreak start to shrink.
“Now, these metrics are concerning,” Jahangir said. “But other metrics continue to be in the satisfactory range.”
That includes the percent of local tests that are coming back positive. Dr. James Hildreth of Meharry Medical College says even as the number of residents getting tested has grown, the proportion of those who are testing positive has remained fairly stable.
According to a WPLN News data analysis, the percent of positive tests has inched up gradually in the past few weeks, from 6% to 10%.
Hildreth attributed changes in the percent positive rate, as well as the recent rise in cases, to statistical variation, based on factors like how many people have been tested in a given day. He said the consistently low percentage of positive results mean the health department is doing a good job of testing, beyond just those who are clearly sick.
“You might have expected, if we greatly expanded our testing, we would have seen a difference in the percent of people testing positive,” Hildreth said. “Most of the experts say that if your positive test rate is in the twenties, you’re probably not testing enough people, because we know 20% of the population is probably not positive.”
Officials say they’ll continue to monitor data trends before making decisions about when to let businesses open. The health department plans to start publishing the various data metrics officials are monitoring on a dashboard on the covid19.nashville.gov website within 24 hours.
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