Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris said mayors of each of the county’s seven municipalities are expected to deliver Stay at Home orders by the end of Tuesday similar to the one Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland issued Monday.
The end date for those orders will not be specified, but will be reviewed every seven days and renewed if necessary.
“If all of us don’t work collaboratively, we will continue to see spread and so the effort here is to make sure everybody is doing the same thing for the same goal and that’s to reduce spread and encourage social distancing,” Harris said. “I think this is a major disruption. There’s no doubt about it. The coronavirus is a major disruption to our way of life and we can expect it’ll have a pretty long lasting effect on our way of life.”
Harris said the goal at the end of the day is to “put people in a position to stay safe.”
Harris said the order will be enforced by the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office: “In the first instance, we’ll politely ask people to be compliant, but we might have a stronger set of options should the need arise.
“The only way to get the message out around social distancing and reducing spread is to be extremely aggressive.”
Alisa Haushalter, director of the Shelby County Health Department said Monday afternoon that the number of cases in the county has reached 93.
Currently, there are 103 individuals under quarantine in the county.
There are 615 cases in the state as of Monday afternoon. Two individuals in Tennessee have died as a result of COVID-19.
Haulshalter said the county is continuing to see transmission in the workplace so it is “critical that individuals do not go to work if they are ill.”
She also said the health department anticipates the Stay at Home orders will have a “positive impact” on the outbreak. Generally, the number of cases double every five to seven days. Haulshalter said the county is looking to reduce that doubling every week and lower the peak curve.
Looking at China as an example, Haulshalter said it might be as many as four incubation periods of the coronavirus, which equates to about two months.
“We ideally hope to see some peak in two to four weeks, but we know the numbers are going to go up in the next couple of weeks and hopefully start to plateau by then and then come down,” Haulshalter said. “We don’t know in the United States and here in the South how the summer and spring seasonality is going to impact it.”
