Chris Walker Health Update 4 20 20 By Hamilton County Indiana

Chris Walker emergency coordinator for Hamilton County, Health Department, joins us this morning morning, Chris hey good morning, Tami bring us up-to-date on the numbers from over the weekend. Well, we looked like earlier. In the week we had a nice little law where we had some days with 9 10 12 new cases, then, towards the end of the week, we jumped up back into the low to mid 20s for new cases per day and a lot of that came from new data coming in more testing being done, some labs getting caught up on their reporting to state things like that, so we think over time we, you know we may not go back to the 9 and 10 days right away, but we should be seeing a taper up back off from that 20 to 25 and start working our way back down here shortly, good news, you started releasing new to n boat in demographics, age and sex of those who tested positive. Why is it that we can do that now, and we weren't able to do it earlier, so we've talked about before the need for HIPAA privacy. The protection of a person's protected health information, so now that we have a certain number of cases, and we've exceeded a certain number of deaths, we thought it was prudent that we could safely put out that information without potentially singling out an individual or a group of individuals that may expose that protected health information. So we'll always see more information like that.

Coming from your department, our goal is to try and update that daily. However, you know when we get the data in it is possible that it's incomplete there might be some errors in the initial data so with depending upon our workload, it really depends on how quickly we can get that all sorted out and pushed back out to the public, but our goal is to push it out as much as we can. So there's been a big push from some to reopen. We even saw some protests over the weekend, even here in Indianapolis, at the governor's home. Your thoughts on when and how we can start reopening well, for the first thing I'd say is we're gonna look at what the governor is suggesting.

We do so right now. We're looking at status quo until at least the beginning of May, but we are working with our partners, including the Hamilton County Tourism, to look at options for what we can do in the county when we are allowed to reopen and what we can do to help mitigate risk so that when we do reopen we're helping to keep our numbers down yeah, you know with the weather getting nice -. People are really itching to get out. We've seen more people out this weekend than I've seen yet any precautions or thoughts about that for folks sure I mean there's, there's a lot of wonderful opportunities here in Hamilton County. As far as the rails-to-trails program, where you can get out on the Moon and some other trails and go for a walk, I believe the golf courses are still open.

As long as you are safeguarding yourself, the big thing is to make sure you're, maintaining that good social distance of 6 feet or more from people that are not in your immediate family at all times, and you know, wear your protective mask. This is not to help keep you safe. This is to help keep others safe, so I've seen one logo somewhere said wearing is caring. This is the way we help safeguard our communities by protecting others by wearing this for ourselves anything else, you want to add anything that we need to think of as we move through the week ahead. You know I just I think hang in there you know, keep washing your hands.

We want to see everyone get back to work, get back to playing their sports and having a great time, but we want to do it safely, so I mean we appreciate everyone's efforts, the know. It's not been easy, but you know I think we're all kind of starting to see that light at the end of the tunnel, and if we keep doing this, you know we'll get to that end of the tunnel. Much faster thanks, Chris.

Source : Hamilton County Indiana