Nashville’s Strides To Flatten The Curve Are Real, But Progress Is ‘Fragile’

Nashville is continuing to make favorable strides in combatting the coronavirus.

More than 30% of regional hospital beds and a similar share of intensive care units are available. And the 14-day average of new cases being reported each day is now at 69, a decrease of 23 in the past two weeks.

“As we continue to open up our city, we can go out more,” says Alex Jahangir, chair of the Board of Health. “But remember the virus is the same virus as two months ago.”

At the start of the epidemic, Nashville leaders planned to build a 14,000-bed auxiliary hospital after estimates predicated the possibility of overrun hospitals across the county. But the need for increased hospital capacity hasn’t been the case in Tennessee.

But while health leaders say the spread of COVID-19 is slowing — thanks in part to mass testing and the early implementation of Davidson County’s “Safer-at-Home” order — residents aren’t in the clear.

“The epidemic continues, but at a simmer,” says Melissa McPheeters, a health policy professor and epidemiologist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. “Our success is real but it is fragile. Any single case can be the spark that sets off the wildfire. And we have seen this happen in other countries that have initially contained the epidemic.”

She says that while the number of cases are on a continuous decline, there are still clusters with numbers higher than the county’s average.