BOH Minutes of 111820 - Laserfiche WebLink

Browse Search

MINUTES ORANGE COUNTY BOARD OF HEALTH November 18, 2020 o There were 197 new cases in the last 7 days, an average of 28 cases daily. • The ED visits are starting to decrease. • Hospitalizations are starting to increase as well as the percent positive for tests. It is currently at 3.5%, still below the ideal percentage of 5% or less. • The OCHD is ramping up our testing. In the 1st week of November, we had a record high for our testing herein the county. There were 5,700 individuals tested. Asa result of the increased testing, some comments and complaints regarding delays in the results were received. StarMed has onboarded a second lab in Greenville in which our samples are being sent. They self-report a turnaround time of 21 hours. • We have on boarded a new testing vendor, OptumServe, via another resource from the state. They are holding testing events at the R7 Lot on Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd in Chapel Hill, Monday through Friday from 9am-5pm. We've requested more staff to man that site due to the volume of individuals wanting to be tested. We continue to have daily testing at our Hillsborough site as well. • There is a new COVID County System Alert. Orange County is currently yellow status, meaning we still have significant community spread with low impact. Overall, we are maintaining and doing fairly well in comparison to some of the other counties in the state. The criteria are set to align with the White House Taskforce and how they're doing their reporting. The criteria is determined by: o the test rates in the last 14 days per 100k people o the percent positive —greater than 10% is critical and equals red, 8-10% equals orange, less than 8% equals yellow o hospital impact— composite based score comprised of the percentage of COVID hospitalizations, COVID ED visits and staffing to cover open beds • This Friday, Ms. Stewart will be meeting with the County Manager and the Emergency Services Director to discuss our thresholds and whether we need to consider implementation of different mitigation strategies as our COVID cases continue to increase. There will also be meetings regarding the vaccination distribution and storage process. C. Media Items Ms. Stewart mentioned that the articles in the Board packet which were just a selection of the numerous COVI D-1 9-related articles that were gathered by our Communications Manager, Kristin Prelipp, who is out on vacation. Included in the Board's packet were articles regarding the courthouse's shutdown due to COVID-19 exposure, higher COVID case numbers in the Triangle area with lower numbers in rural parts of the state and safe holiday practices. Media items were in the packet which focused on Orange County's events and our involvement in various efforts. At 8:14pm, Bruce Baldwin motioned to move into closed session and Sam Lasris seconded. Vill. Closed Session to Discuss Health Directors's Annual Review S:\Managers Working Files\BOH\Agenda &Abstracts\2020 Agenda &Abstracts/ November Page 4