Plans are under way, in coordination with the State of Nevada under the Governor’s framework criteria, to safely open back up the community said community leaders at today’s Board of Health meeting. The board met this morning under the leadership of County Health officer, Dr. Tedd McDonald to discuss the preliminary steps that can be taken to ease restrictions as a result of COVID-19.
According to Jim Barbee, county manager, he has spent the last week working with state public health officials trying to get a number of tests to do community-wide testing that would provide data that can be used to make wise decisions on how and when businesses could reopen. “If we can collect the testing over a period of time and knowing when the virus got here, how much longer we think we have for it to work through the community, basically us having herd immunity, we’ll be able to use that data to make good decisions on how and what we should open to be the safest we can.”
Procedures are still being worked out in terms of how to collect the data that will provide information on which to base decisions. “The state is agreeing to provide the county some capability for testing the larger population,” said Barbee. “We haven’t determined how we’re going to do that – the state is looking at choosing a random sampling of community members from the DMV lists that we would call and then can come get tested. Basically, we need to identify a diverse population and a random selection, but we haven’t figured out the protocols on how we’re going to do that.”
With10% of the population, Barbee said the state can use statistics to determine how much of the population may have already been exposed and project how many people will still be exposed. “The idea is to randomly select 175 people a day over a three-week period that would be close to 2,400 tests, or 10% and use that data to project the trajectory of the total exposure in the community,” he said. The state is making 4,311 tests available to Churchill County.
Barbee said on May 7th the county commission will be discussing and bringing forward a proposal “for what it’s going to look like for us to open things up.” The emergency management team is currently working on a draft plan, and “will be bringing it forward to have the commissioners review and discuss and figure out how we get there from here.”
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