News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
Overton County’s rising number of positive COVID tests is troubling, according to Health Department Director Andy Langford.
“We’re now hovering around 9-percent on our positivity rate,” Langford said. “That means that almost 1-in-10 people we’re testing, ourselves, the hospital, local physicans, and testing sites. One way or the other, 1-in-10 are positive.”
In addition to seeing a higher rate of positive test results, Langford said the infection rate is on the rise.
“In Overton County, we have 80 cases over this four month period,” Langford said. “We’ve tested 2,500 people. That gives us an infection rate of about 3.2-percent. Looking here in just July, we have 23 new cases and we’ve tested 378 people. So, our infection rate is now up over the last two weeks. We’re sitting at about 6-percent. We’ve almost doubled our infection rate.”
Langford said that although Overton County’s rate is still under the state average, people need to be careful to keep the virus from spreading as schools and businesses continue to open. Langford said rates are increasing across the state.
“We’re entering, here, some different phases with schools opening and businesses up and running,” Langford said. “You have to stay diligent. This is not going away.”
With so many unknowns still surrounding COVID-19, Langford said medical professionals are trying to find ways to better treat the disease.
“We don’t know everything,” Langford said. “And we’re finding out something new everyday. We don’t know how it’s going to impact someone who has it now and how it will effect their lungs in 10-years. We don’t know the respiratory problems they’re going to have…There’s so many things we don’t know but that are sitting there and we don’t want them to be dealing with health problems down the road.”
Langford said he would like to see people taking the virus more seriously as fall approaches. He said he is concerned about how healthcare workers will navigate through COVID on top of the other seasonal diseases that begin to arrive later in the year.
“The scary part of this is when we get on up into fall and you have flu, upper G.I., and strep throat,” Langford said. “You have regular sickness and cold in people and then you put COVID in there with it, then we’re looking at a very sticky situation.”
Langford said COVID testing is still available at the health department from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. daily.
