As new COVID-19 cases continue to rise locally, landing Chattanooga in the top four cities nationally for case growth rate, Hamilton County leaders told the Chattanooga Times Free Press this week they have no plans to re-tighten previously eased restrictions intended to stem the spread of the pandemic.
Let's get this straight. Pretend that rising number of coronavirus cases in our community is your own child's rising fever and that fever is edging over 103 - a fair comparison, we think, to us being the fourth city nationally for case growth. Yet you have no plan to give your child medication to bring down the fever. You have the means, you even have the medicine in your pocket, but you don't plan to use it.
That's what Hamilton County health and government leaders are doing with our community. And, yes, that's what Hamilton County leaders are doing with our economy. They're gambling with our future to keep open today when they know that more illness, more hospitalizations and more deaths sooner or later will drag our economy down.
Talk about penny-wise and pound-foolish.
Gov. Bill Lee does have a plan. Boost testing in Hamilton County.
But wait, isn't increased testing - Tennessee is among states with the most testing in the nation - what county officials have said drove our spike? Yes - at least that's what they said until the COVID-19 case numbers and hospitalization numbers clearly showed they were fooling themselves and trying to fool us. But they're not fooling anyone who can - and will - add, subtract, multiply and divide.
Judge for yourselves: Testing is up by nearly 349% since May 1. But positive cases have grown faster, increasing by about 374%.
Plus, as of late Thursday, the Hamilton County health department confirmed a new high in COVID patients in the intensive care units at local hospitals and also reported 71 new people with COVID-19 on Thursday, bringing the county total to 843 and continuing a fourth week of rising new cases. That continuing rising spike in cases here has landed Chattanooga on The New York Times' list of regions with the steepest growth in cases, at No. 4 behind Fayetteville, Arkansas; Hanford, California; and Yuma, Arizona.
According to The Times study, cases here are doubling roughly every 10 days.
No worries. We're going to have virus cases, according to our leaders. So we should just get over it.
"One of the things that we have said since the beginning is, until there's a vaccine, we can expect surges," Hamilton County Health Department Administrator Becky Barnes said early this week when she also announced more than 180 new cases in four days. "We may suppress this, we may have a surge later on. This virus is unpredictable, and we don't have anything other than social distancing and contact tracing to effectively fight it."
Well, then, let's talk about that social distancing that we "trust" people to do even as we reopen, reopen, reopen - and keep the fever medicine in our pockets.
Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama were among the last states to institute stay-at-home rules and among the first states to relax those rules. County Mayor Jim Coppinger echoed Gov. Lee, and in late April and early May, the county even lifted previous restrictions on businesses, public spaces and event gatherings of up to 50 people.
People have to work, was the mantra. Why, then, is regional unemployment continuing to rise?
Since those restrictions were lifted, COVID-19 cases have grown at a higher rate each week.
Coppinger, at least, recognizes that testing isn't the only driver of the virus' spread, since "trust" isn't resulting in very many people even wearing masks, let alone social distancing.
"We want to help the people that are exposed and that have the virus, but at the same time, the other people that want to get out and try to feed their families, or are going back to work or back to church, or those types of things are in the majority ... So what we've got to do is educate them how to continue to be in the majority," Coppinger said. "But people have personal responsibility."
In other words, right now there are more well people than sick people and the well people rule? In other words, we wish you'd wear a mask and not crowd around, but we're not going to do anything that might rile you?
Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke, whose stay-at-home order for the city was overruled by Gov. Lee and Coppinger, can add, subtract, multiply and divide.
"We know that both [testing and community spread] are happening. We need to continue to increase testing, but also recognize that there is an increased positivity rate going on that should concern everyone," Berke said Wednesday. "Everyone should be worried about the large uptick that we've seen over the last few weeks. When there is increased circulation and activity you can see more spread, just like is occurring in Chattanooga and in our entire region right now."
Still, Coppinger dithers. And when asked about the medicine in his pocket - reinstating restrictions, he said: "We wake up every day and have discussions about where we are and where it's headed but, you know, there hasn't been any real indicator yet, as we can continue to test and continue to see people recover ... So not right now, no," Coppinger said.
What more indicators, exactly, does he need?