On Friday, April 24, Governor Ralph Northam unveiled a plan to escape the quarantine called Forward Virginia that involves several phases as the number of tests increases. We hear details of that plan, as well as hear more from the Thomas Jefferson Health District. We also check in with Marta Keene of JABA to hear a little about how seniors in our community are faring, and how people can help. Finally, the Rick Olivarez Trio plays us out.
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Quotes:
“Our metrics for phase one are very clear. We need to see the percentage of positive tests and the number of hospitalizations both track downward over 14 days. We need to be sure we have enough capacity in our hospital beds and in our intensive care units. And we need to sustain our PPE supply.” - Governor Ralph Northam, April 24, 2020
“We continue to look at innovative ways to get testing to different communities, to be able to do large-scale testing and support all of the work of the Health Department as they do as Governor Northam described as boxing people in, making sure we understand where that disease is and how we take care of it.” - Dr. Karen Remley. April 24, 2020
“The gold standard for a test was something we call a nasopharyngeal swab and you probably have heard people talk about it. It’s a skinny little swab that goes all the way back in your nose. If you’re a pediatric ER doctor like me or a pediatrician you do them every winter when kids are sick for RSV… if you’re a cardiologist, you may have never done that before.” - Dr. Karen Remley. April 24, 2020
“Contact tracing is a very labor intensive thing for every one person who has COVID-19. You have to track down all of the people that they’ve come into contact with. We understand that as we begin to move towards decreasing social distancing, we will have to increase our ability to do contact tracing because the cases will start to rise again and we want to try to contain that as best we can.” - Dr. Norm Oliver, April 24, 2020
“Slightly more women than men have been tested positive, and we do have here the hospitalization data and you can see again that there is a predominance in the number of African-Americans who are hospitalized, 32 cases, and that is 65 percent of the individuals hospitalized.” - Dr. Denise Bonds, April 24, 2020