WATCH: Madison County health, government officials hold news conference on coronavirus outbreak

WATCH: Madison County health, government officials hold news conference on coronavirus outbreak

We're interrupting regular >> and we're interrupting regular programming with breaking news out of madison county.

>> county and city leaders are about to give a coronavirus update.

Let's listen in.

>> mr. birdwell: our speakers today will be mr. david pill spillers from huntsville hospital, mayor tommy battle, city of huntsville, and chad emerson ceo of downtown huntsville inc.

You will notice that we are sitting six feet apart according to cdc guidelines as well as our own practices to separate and sanitize.

I'll begin with a brief update on the current situation.

Currently there are 837 cases statewide in alabama.

79 of those are confirmed within mowz.

And one result -- resulting death of those.

We continue to monitor the situation as always and respond accordingly.

With that said, we'll go to mr. david spillers from huntsville hopped.

>> mr. spillers: good morning.

Following up on the numbers that jeff just mentioned, one thing i will tell you about the numbers, always keep in mind that they're changing very quickly.

There's a lot of pending numbers out there we don't have results for.

So anytime we give you a number it's subject to change within a short period of time.

Yesterday we tested about five00 patience -- excuse me, yesterday we tested 250.

We would like to test about 500 a day.

We are limited in our testing right now because we don't have adequate supplies from the lab vendor that supports us.

We do not have john hunt park open for drive-through testing we hope to have that open tomorrow qel -- we will not know until late today.

We will communicate through our website and the news media if you're able to open tomorrow in john hunt park.

We had been seeing 200 to 300 patients a day.

If we get the supplies we will open up there.

I can't tell you how important testing is.

Not having adequate testing, supplies, hurts our entire community, we need to diagnose people as quickly as possible so we can get them isolated.

Without appropriate testing you can't do that.

We currently have 56 patients in our hospitals waiting testing.

We only have seven patients in the madison county patients facilities, inpatients.

We have one more in the region.

Only two of the madison county patients are on ventilators.

So a very small number of inpatients for the number of people that we tested reaching wide.

We hope that that number continues to be low.

I will tell you that the census in all of our hospitals, particularly those outside madison county have fallen substantially creating bed capacity in the smaller hospitals.

That's not true here in huntsville main.

Across the system we have roughly 800 patients in the bed this morning.

As i mentioned, seven of those are in madison county are covid patients.

One in the region.

8 out of 800 patients are covid-19 patients.

We continue to see everything else we were seeing before this crisis started.

I want to commend our team.

I'll do this every time we meet.

Morale is outstanding.

Our team members and our clinicians are doing a great job taking care of the people that are here.

I've been very impressed as i watched on the news media when communities have applauded health care professionals who have come to work every day.

They're coming in, they're risking their health to take care of everybody else.

It would be nice if those community members that are not abiding by the request to separate and sanitize would do so.

You're putting yourself at risk, you're putting our clinicians at risk, and it's just not appropriate.

I commend tommy and paul and dale for what they've done as far as restricting what's going on in our community.

I was asked earlier today if i thought that was enough.

Yeah, i think it's enough, if people would comply.

People just need to comply.

I know how hard it is and i know how hard it's going to be for 30 more days, 35 more days, whatever it is to get to the end of april.

But we need to do this in order to keep our hospitals from being overrun with patients.

I'm scared to death when i see what's going on in new york and new orleans and some of these other places about that happening here.

We don't want it to happen here.

And i think we as a community can keep it from happening here.

But we have to follow the rules that have been set up.

I think when i met with you on saturday, the days are starting to run together a little bit, i mentioned that we're still waiting some test results from early lab tests that were run, early flu covid-19 tests that were run at our flu and fever clinic.

We still have about 100 out standing from lab core for those people that were tested.

There's 100 people out there that still haven't heard their result.

We are pushing e labcorp to get those but they are backed up nationally.

I would remind those 100 people, hopefully you're well now.

That was two weeks ago.

I hope you're feeling better.

If you would like to be tested again, you can go to our flu and fever chin -- clinic and we'll test you again.

Those are generally getting turned around in 24 to 48 hours.

Our supplies continue to look good based on where we stand.

All of that could change if we get a large influx of patients.

We received a large shipment of surgical masks last week.

We expect to get a large shipment of n95 masks this week.

Our pharmacy's constantly looking at the various drugs needed to take care of these patients and appropriately ordering those drugs so we'll have those available.

Later this week we plan to meet with the army corps of engineers i think they're going to the four largest cities in alabama to look at how they can help the health care organizations if they need additional capacity.

So we will discuss with them what would happen if we -- if our capacity exceeded the ability of the hospitals to take care of patients and make sure we have alternative sites laned planned out if needed.

And continued to hope we don't need those sites.

I also want to commend all the -- the business community here in our area.

Numerous companies continue to reach out to us and offer to manufacture maskings, shields, other clinical equipment that's in short supply.

This morning we agreed we're going to try to coordinate those efforts to the chamber of chamber of commerce here if haunts vil, madison county chamber of commerce.

Let them be the focal point.

If you own a business and you think you can 3-d print spg we need, if you would coordinate that through the chamber of chamber of commerce and we'll have a point of contact to the hospital, we can get to you specifications, we can get you the type of equipment that you want to make so you can look at that and do what you need to do to start 3-d printing those.

Those efforts are greatly appreciated.

It would just be easier for us to coordinate those through a single source as opposed to trying to take the calls individually from all the companies that want to help.

But we do appreciate the support of this community.

It's been amazing the number of people who have reached out and said let us try to do this or let us try to do that.

It's greatly appreciated.

With that i'll close until there's questions.

Thank you.

>> mr. birdwell: thank you, david.

Now we'll go to mayor tommy battle, city of huntsville.

>> mayor battle: thank you, and, you know, first off i think we have to start and say thank you to our selfless and our dedicated health care workers who are out there.

They're the ones taking the brunt of this.

They're the tip of the spear.

They're the ones who are taking this fight on.

And they're doing a great job, and i think each of us owe them a lot of appreciation for the job that they're doing on the day to day.

If you go back and look at it, our first confirmed covid-19 case was wednesday, march 18.

Which was 12 days ago.

Seems like years ago.

Seems like we've been in this thing for years.

But 12 days ago was our first covid-19 case.

When it came in, we have watched over the last 12 days, we've gone a couple of days we hit 20, we hit 40s, we hit 60s and now we're hitting 80.

But that's because we're doing testing.

If you look at the numbers that huntsville hospital is doing, probably 2,200 tests, maybe 3, 000 testst this last week.

And the testing is proving out something that we need to know, how many actual cases we have out there.

Last week we closed down our parks and we spent the weekend chasing people often of our parks.

Teams trying to have team sports , others trying to do other things, and we chased them off the park and they left and i believe we got the message across that our parks are not going to be open for team sports it's open for walking.

It's open for -- if someone wants to go jog or ride a bike, you can do that.

But you can do that without being next to somebody.

And this is serious, folks.

If we take this serious, we're going to be in -- we're going to get through this thing.

But we have to be very serious about it.

The governor's office gave direction this -- on friday as to what is open and what is closed.

There's a little bit of confusion as to what is open and what is closed.

I invite everybody to go to our covid-19 city of huntsville web page and look.

If you're -- if you're on the list of the closed, you are closed.

If you're not on the list of closed, you are open.

But as we watched it this weekend and paul finley from madison, dale strong from county commission and myself all monitored over the weekend.

Everybody was doing a good job making sure that we monitored and making sure that we kept people separated by six feet and we were watching to make sure that we were doing what we were supposed to.

A couple of stores have people with -- limited numbers of people in.

And then they had lines in the front of the cash registers of six feet so that people stayed separated.

We're still going to work on that.

There are still a few hotspots out there that we're going to work on, but we're going to continue to work on those.

Some of our questions that are coming into the office is talking about a shelter in place order.

Shelter in place order is what birmingham has.

If you compare a shelter in place to what the governors and the alabama department of public health has put out, it is just about the same thing, the one thing it lacks is a curfew.

We seriously, chairman strong, mayor mayor finley and i talked about that this weekend.

And after monitoring, we were out saturday afternoon, saturday night, 10:00, 11:00.

There was basically no traffic out there.

If you went downtown, you saw an empty downtown.

If you went to the parks,er you saw an empty park.

We were monitoring to see if that was the next step.

If we have to get to that, we will do it.

But at this point, it's not something that we're going to use at this point.

And we make that decision in conjunction with the alabama department of public health, with our two hospitals, and in conjunction with consultation with them.

We want to make sure that they understand, that everybody understands these decisions are not taken lightly but these are decisions that need to be made.

And as we make these decisions, we make it as a group because we want the best input we can get from each of our alabama department of public health, from our hospitals, from our medical society, and with what we do.

One thing i would suggest, if you go to one of the bigger box stores and you go to shop at one of the bigger box stores, one person, one cart.

One person.

One cart.

Don't take the whole family down to one of these stores.

One of these box stores.

Take one person, one cart, and stay separated.

If you do that, we get through this, and we get through it very well.

We have some other little things we are doing as we go along, just to make sure that we can accomplish what is necessary to make sure that this community is safe.

This is -- i'm looking over my notes to make sure i've hit everything.

This is an important time for the city of huntsville and for madison county.

If we all do the jobs, the jobs that we've been doing, if our community takes this serious, as they have been doing, as they did this weekend, if we will put the effort forward for the next ten days, next 14 days, we will get through the first surge and we will get through the first surge and be able to move on down the road.

Will it be over?

Probably not.

But it will get us through the first surge and we will make sure we get through the first surge without overwhelming our hospital facilities and hospital personnel.

That is very important to us.

That is the key to the success of this whole plan, this whole strategy.

The hospitals have put together a great plan and strategy.

It's now up to us to enact it.

And we will to work to enact it to make sure that we make sure that the public is safe in the city of huntsville, the city of madison and madison county.

Thank you.

>> mr. birdwell: thank you, mayor battle.

Now we'll go to chad emerson, president and ceo of downtown huntsville incorporated.

>> : mr. emerson thank you.

Real excited to share that your local business association are working really closely together, collaborating to support local businesses and local employees.

And they're ability to operate as closely as possible keeps people employed.

It's been collaboration.

At d.h.i.

We're folk focusing on three groups, the businesses, employees and guests.

For the employees we know there are a lot of people have lost their jobs, been furloughed.

We hope there will be a program to provide gap opportunity.

So later on this week, downtown .org, we're keeping a list of downtown restaurants and food and beverage establishments that are open with the governor 's guidelines.

There are over 20 open available for curbside or takeout or for delivery.

So you can still get food from out of the home.

And beverages from out of the home.

It's really important wref to eat.

Grocery stores are a way to meet this need.

They have modified their men 92 ewwws so you can order a family meal or meal cooked from home.

Please keep that in mind.

When shopping with them, two important things to understand.

Most of them, at least in the downtown area that we have worked with, we've worked to put tape lines.

You'll see tape, sometime sidewalk chalk they're in six- footed increments.

Respect their type lines.

Their ability to open and serve you is if you pay attention to those tape lines.

They are not just there just for the heck of it.

If you order your food and wait to pick up your food, please respect the tape lines.

It's very important.

Next, when you go and order it's not a time to gather.

It may be nice to see someone in line, resist the urge to go out side and catch up and visit.

That's not the time for this.

Getting the food to go or curbside is what it is.

Get it to go, get the curbside and take it away.

Okay?

As much as we love our downtown, this is not time to gather in downtown.

Other than getting your food and beverages.

Last category that we're working with are the businesses.

And businesses are been tough for them.

Especially downtown you have a higher concentration of small locally owned businesses.

We're working with them hard.

Every monday and thursday 9:00 a.m.

And 1:00 p.m.

We do a conference call on zoom seems to be the thing everybody does on zoom.

We've opened those conference calls at 9:00 a.m.

And 1:00 p.m.

Every monday and thursday to any the food and beverage.

We're trying to share best practices.

Sometimes in a situation like this it's just as harmful to provide too much information rather than too little.

There's sometimes a wave of information that makes it hard for these small business people trying to stay open to consume it all.

We're curing that very carefully and those conference calls take about 15 minutes or so.

Any food and beverage establishment they're really focused towards that.

You're welcome to dial in.

You can just go to downtown huntsville.org and you'll see on our about page how to sign up for those.

We're also giving regular updates on our plog downtown huntsville.org/blog.

Taking the best practice information.

Not trying to share every single piece but the pieces we feel are most pertinent.

There's all kinds of things out there, resources, the hospitality association, chamber others are doing that.

We're grateful that many of you are still shopping in downtown restaurants.

We are posting videos on our social media plat platforms twice a day.

We're being filmed in accordance with all the protocols.

We want you to hear first hand from the business owners about their food and beverage availability.

Check those out for more information and two things, please respect the tape lines that you see when ordering your food and waiting for your food and please do not regather as you're waiting for and ordering your food.

>> mr. birdwell: thank you, chad thank you for watching today.

We will be back here again tomorrow at noon for another daily briefing.

Until then, any critical updates will be posted to the city of huntsville's covid-19 web page as well as the websites of our partners here today.

Stay safe, stay separate, and remember to sanitize.

At this point we'll be glad to take questions.

Just as a reminder as you come to the mic, please identify yourself and who you are affiliated with and we'll allow one question with a follow-up.

>> nolan ceo with waff 48.

My question is for ceo david spillers.

Yesterday you said you did about 250 tests.

You'd like to see about 500 be performed.

Is there still -- now is that because people aren't showing up or is because there's still a pretty severe lack of the covid-19 testing kits?

>> mr. spillers: that's because we no longer have enough kits to do that extra testing.

When we took john hunt park out of service we were doing 200 to 300 a day at john hunt park.

We can't do that today.

So our typical week day would be 500 to 600 tests.

We'll probably run about 250 today, maybe 300 so we'll get about half of what we really need to run today.

It is testing supplies from the vendor that we use, correct.

>> is there a time line for when we'll be getting more shipments, more supplies in order to help meet the need?

>> mr. spillers: we're at their mercy on that.

You know, we -- it's been a good supplier to this point.

I just think the demand is starting to exceed their ability to get the products wholesale.

So that impacts their ability to get them to us.

You know, i'll preach a little bit.

We have one of the largest hospital based labs in america sitting right inside our hospital.

And for whatever reason the government chose to allocate lab test kits to labcorp, quest, and national labs.

And not to hospitals like ours where we could do immediate test ing and turn it around quickly.

I think that was a flaw in the system and continues to be a flaw in the system.

I think that's one of the reasons that we're waiting 12 days and still don't have tests back from people who were tested 12 days ago.

So i hope they can remedy.

We're still working with them to try to remedy that.

The -- roche is the supplier we need to give us the materials so we can do festing -- testing in our lab.

We've been in constant contact with them.

But so far we've gotten nowhere with them.

If you want to write somebody and explain, you can write the ceo of roche labs.

We're in constant contact with them or daily contact with them.

If we could get the material, we could test locally, we wouldn't be so dependent upon these out side entities and we could turn around a lot faster.

>> kelley smith with whnt news 19.

This question is for mayor tommy battle.

You were talking about social distancing and people being really mindful when they go out that one person, one cart.

We've got several calls this weekend where people were concerned that, you know, garden centers were packed with people, big box stores weren't -- people weren't following those guidelines inside big box stores i know you already addressed this but really could you speak to your message who are not following these guidelines and also, you know, what would you tell these folks, how dangerous is that kind of behavior?

>> mayor battle: , you know, it's very dangerous.

Not taking this seriously.

We are seeing the vast majority of the people out there are following the guidelines.

Yesterday -- saturday there was a little wedding down in big spring park.

The only people who didn't -- didn't do social distancing were the two who got married and they kissed.

And we'll give them that.

But the rest of the people out there, even the people in the wedding party were six feet a apart.

What we saw is most people were staying apart.

The -- some of the big box stores are still part of the problem.

We are working with them to make sure that they keep their social distancing, that they put the lines down at their checkout counters so they can stay six feet apart.

They keep people separated who are waiting to get in the store.

The importance of this is our success as a community in getting through this surge.

And i can't say it any more importantly than that.

It is our success at getting through that.

If we don't, we fail.

That's the question mark that we're right now.

We are in the first days of the surge.

We have about 10 to 14 days left to go through it.

And if people will follow what we're asking them to, separate, sanitize, wash your hands, if they will follow that, we will get through it.

If they don't, we will fail.

>> my follow-up to that is as you said, many businesses in the community had to close as part of the governor's order.

At this point is there any kind of enforcement effort?

Are you asking the police department to get involved in this or is it more of an honor system, and if it is more of an honor system at this point, when would it be appropriate to change that?

>> mayor battle: we're working with each of those industries and each of the companies as we go through.

The first thing that they'll get , if they don't comply with the letter -- with the rule of law, which was put down by alabama department of public health, is they will get a letter from our city attorney delivered by one of our police officers.

They will have -- they will have a little bit of time to comply.

If think don't comply they will be shut down.

We will enforce the laws to make sure that we keep -- keep the companies or the businesses closed that have to be closed.

Nobody wants to do this.

It's a hard thing to do to close a business and close someone who is part of your community partnership in a community.

But it's a necessity at this time.

And that necessity means we're going to keep pushing to do that >> any kind of criminal charge with that?

>> mayor battle: i think the -- if a -- if i read the release right, it's $500 -- up to $500 and some -- something else.

Everybody so far has been very good and in compliance.

One of the stores called us sunday, said i'm not clear.

I have this in my thing which is not covered, i have this which is covered.

By the closure.

Can i be open or closed?

We reached out and got them an answer and the answer was he was going to be closed.

He was very compliant with us.

He worked with us.

You know, 99.9% of the people that we talk to are very compliant.

If we ask them to do something, they think enough of this community to do it.

>> sydney martin with channel 31 my question is for mr. spillers.

Can you talk about so people who were tested at the fever and flu clinic on those first days that are still working, i know people have reached out to us last week who were told it could take eight days.

They're at home in self quarantine.

Other people they came in contact with, are they still out and about?

What's being done to prevent people they could have given it to to be still out there?

>> mr. spillers: when they were tested they were told to go home and self quarantine until they got the results.

Hopefully they've been self quarantining the whole time and have been distancing themselves from others.

If they've been in contact with others, those people would need to be monitoring symptoms and if they show symptoms they need to come to the flu and fever clinic to get tested as well.

>> just to clarify, while people are waiting for results are they supposed to be contacting people they were in touch with -- [ no audio ] >> maria, they're in there day in, day out from day one, putting themselves at risk.

And they can't say thanks enough to them.

And basically asking everybody else to be thinking about them as well during this lard process >> maria waxel: we also heard chad emerson from downtown huntsville incorporated say too, when you go order and pick up your food from the businesses, don't forget you need to be re separated.

Don't use this as a regathering technique.

There's a good and important reminder for all of us as we're out and about.

The temperatures are beginning to warm up for us.

>> another key point from the mayor, and he says, because a lot of people talk about the shelter in place.

Birmingham has already done that and so the mayor says basically the order from this past friday started into effect saturday at 5:00 p.m.

It's almost the same as a shelter in place w the exception of a kurr vai -- curfew.

They're always keeping options open in the case that's needed but so far what they are seeing so far is it's not needed.

But he says, hey, if something happens the way they would need to change their mind about that, they could very well possibly do that.

But again, right now, no shelter in place for madison county and huntsville.

We're going to continue to follow throughout all north alabama, continuous responses, various agencies, various lead ers all across our viewing area and how they're continue to respond