Nashville Mayor John Cooper said at a press conference Tuesday that he and other city officials will introduce their own plan to reopen the city’s economy after it closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Cooper said he will likely introduce his plan on Thursday and that it will not follow the one Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee announced for the state Monday. As reported, Lee is scheduled to end his statewide stay-at-home order on April 30.
Cooper said his plan for restarting Nashville’s economy uses what he called a data-driven approach with four phases. The first phase likely begins in early May, he said.
“[Lee’s plan] excludes the state’s major metro areas, including Nashville and Davidson County, and applies to 89 of our 95 counties,” Cooper said.“But many features of our reopening process make us different — size and population density, infection level, number of businesses that operate here, transportation, commuter patterns, and our global tourism industry.”
To reopen, Cooper said Nashville will have to meet the following requirements:
• A rate of transmission of less than one, meaning each individual does not infect more than one other person in Davidson County
• A 14-day downward trend in new cases of COVID-19
• Adequate testing and Personal Protective Equipment capacity for the region
• A robust health infrastructure to conduct contact tracing investigations throughout the community
Alex Jahangir, who chairs Davidson County’s Metro Coronavirus Task Force, said that as of Tuesday Davidson County had 1,936 confirmed COVID-19 cases, an increase of 33 in the previous 24 hours.
“There are an additional 1,749 cases in the surrounding counties, bringing our total to 3,685 in the region,” he said.“Unfortunately, yesterday we had two more individuals die because of this disease, a 68-year-old female and an 85-year-old male. Both had underlying medical conditions. That brings the total death number in Nashville to 22.”
Meanwhile, Leslie Waller, an epidemiologist with the Metro Nashville Public Health Department, said at Tuesday’s press conference that in recent weeks most of the new cases in Nashville have shifted geographically.
“Most of our new cases are now clustered in the southeastern part of the county,” she said. “Communities that call it home are numerous and diverse, and they work in a number of essential service jobs.”
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Chris Butler is an investigative journalist at The Tennessee Star. Follow Chris on Facebook. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “John Cooper” by John Cooper.
Nashville did not shut down nor did the Gay Pride festival during the hepatitis outbreak.
I figure that “data driven” means that the same highly fraudulent data that led to the shutdown of Nashville and much of America will be used to keep Nashville under the thumb of the bureaucrats for at a very long time. People like Cooper hide behind the “experts” many of whom never had a real job but have always drawn a very handsome paycheck – even when the rest of us cannot go to work.
Open up the economy and take care of the people that are sick and the people that will get sick from the virus but, don’t punish everyone by ruining businesses and people’s lives.. I hope your ideas of opening the Nashville economy and managing the virus will do better than you and your predecessors have done managing Metro ‘s money. Raising property taxes that will solve all financial problems oh yea, I thought that you said you would not raise taxes! Oh that’s right that’s the Democratic credo you live by, say one thing and do another..
If anyone who dies of pneumonia (whether they had lung cancer, Parkinson’s, etc.) has Covid-19 on their death certificate, but they haven’t been tested for the virus, how can we have objective information (facts) about these numbers?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2020/02/13/new-coronavirus-covid-19-counting-method-leads-to-jump-in-cases-deaths/#37c0943016af
It is no surprise that those opposing re-opening are those whose paychecks funded directly or indirectly by the government.
I truly despise these socialist bureaucrats.
Read carefully folks, distilled down, this means the citizens of Nashville get PORKED! Let me translate some of this for you.
“A robust health infrastructure to conduct contact tracing investigations throughout the community”, this means hire more City “private investigators” to track you, AND to rack up more unfunded OPEB (other post employment benefits) like pensions, retirement medical coverage, etc, which Nashville is already millions of $$ behind on.
“Adequate testing and Personal Protective Equipment capacity for the region”, this is code for spending more tax dollars! It’ll be amazing to see what falls under the category of “PPE”, golf clubs, hot tubs, gym memberships, statues of naked people in the middle of roundabouts..
Maybe the Mayor will even hire Megan Berry to run all of these programs, “to keep us safe!” On second thought, one way or another, she’d just find ways to get us all to the “cemetery”.