Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell announced on Tuesday updates to his staff one day after being sworn into office during a private ceremony.
Marjorie Pomeroy-Wallace, who ran O’Connell’s campaign as campaign manager, will serve as his chief of staff. Alex Apple, who served as O’Connell’s communications director during the campaign, was also hired to serve as deputy communications director and press secretary in the mayor’s office.
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Parents of students who attend Metro Nashville Public Schools are upset and said Metro Coronavirus Chair Alex Jahangir is not qualified to influence how and when their kids may attend school.
But Metro Health officials said parents have their facts wrong.
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One board member of nonprofit Healthy Tennessee, founded by Dr. Manny Sethi, has taken positions excusing protestors for spreading the coronavirus, and he and another director have attacked U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn.
Alex Jahangir and Jesse Ehrenfeld were listed as directors of Healthy Tennessee on the nonprofit’s 2018 Form 990EZ, available here.
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Because of COVID-19, Nashville business owners will likely have their worst year ever, but Mayor John Cooper said at Thursday’s press conference that they and others in the city must still pay dramatically higher property taxes.
As The Tennessee Star reported last month, Nashville Metro Council members voted to impose a 34 percent property tax hike upon city residents.
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As of Friday night, members of the Metro Nashville Board of Health did not say specifically why they voted in favor of mandating face coverings or face masks in public to combat COVID-19.
Board members did not answer The Tennessee Star’s emailed questions about the matter before Friday’s stated deadline.
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Davidson County has had an increase in COVID-19 cases as a result of increased testing.
This, according to Metro Public Health Department spokesman Brian Todd.
“I checked with our epidemiologist and was told we have seen a steady increase in testing in Davidson County since mid-April,” Todd told The Tennessee Star in an email Monday.
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Nashville will move to the second of its four-phased plan on Monday to reopen the city’s economy after COVID-19 shut it down for two months.
Cooper announced this at a press conference Thursday.
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Metro Coronavirus Task Force Chair Alex Jahangir scolded members of the White House Thursday for saying — falsely — that Nashville had a sudden 129 percent increase in confirmed COVID-19 cases earlier this month.
Jahangir said a spike at a prison in nearby Trousdale County had a lot to do with the White House reporting false data about Nashville. This, even though, as The Tennessee Star reported, Jahangir earlier this month made misleading claims about Trousdale County numbers and how they relate to Nashville.
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After 53 days in quarantine, Nashville will move to Phase One of Mayor John Cooper’s plan to reopen the city’s economy, at least partially, this coming Monday.
Cooper wasted no time announcing this while opening a press conference Thursday.
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COVID-19 claimed the lives of five more Nashvillians between Monday and Tuesday — all over the age of 60 and all people with underlying health conditions.
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As of press time Monday, Davidson County officials still would not demonstrate precisely how “surrounding counties” had more confirmed COVID-19 cases than Davidson itself did, as they attested last Friday.
Metro Coronavirus Task Force Chair Alex Jahangir said at a press conference Friday that Davidson County had 2,832 confirmed COVID-19 cases. Jahangir also said there were an additional 3,227 cases in the surrounding counties — an increase of 955 in one day. Now, for the first time – Jahangir went on to say – the surrounding counties had more cases than Davidson County.
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Metro Coronavirus Task Force Chair Alex Jahangir said Monday that COVID-19 didn’t hit Nashville as hard as computer models originally predicted.
“Just a few weeks ago we were planning for a 1,000-bed auxiliary hospital because models had shown that our hospitals would be overrun,” Jahangir said, without saying how many people in Davidson County were to have supposedly caught COVID-19, per those models.
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Public affairs strategist and all-star panelist Clint Brewer joined The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – Monday morning on the newsmakers line.
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Counties that surround Nashville and Davidson County now have a higher number of COVID-19 cases than Davidson County does.
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Black Nashvillians make up 13 percent of the confirmed COVID-19 cases in Nashville, but they comprise nearly 40 percent of the deaths in that area, said the chair of the Davidson County Metro Coronavirus Task Force.
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