James Brown encouraged by COVID-19 report

Coffee County EMA Director James Brown gave a much-needed positive COVID-19 report to the Coffee County Commission on Feb. 8.

Brown said that he was encouraged by the decreasing numbers of COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations in the past two weeks. Brown said that Coffee County went from 39 new cases per day to 34 in the past two weeks and said that currently 11 percent of hospitalizations in the state are due to COVID-19, which is down from more than 23 percent in January.

Brown also said it was encouraging that ICU use in the state has dropped to 88 percent from the 97 percent use in January.

One of the more encouraging things is that Alabama is ramping up COVID-19 vaccinations. Brown said that the state has approved eight mass vaccination sites all across the state, including at Southeast Health in Dothan. He said that Southeast Health has already filled up all of their appointments and that they expect to do 1,000 vaccinations per day for the next five days.

Also, appointments for vaccinations can be made online now at www.alcovidvaccine.gov.

“Another good thing we saw last Thursday was that Johnson and Johnson asked for emergency authorization approval (for their vaccine) and we expect that to take around three weeks,” Brown said. “The significant thing is that vaccine is one shot, which will make it much faster to get it out to the public.

“We want to continue encouraging everyone to keep up with their non-pharmaceutical interventions like washing your hands, wearing your mask and social distancing. Just because we have a vaccine doesn’t mean this will immediately go away.”