Dr. Alisa Haushalter – Memphis Flyer

Dr. LaSonya Hall

The void left by the sudden resignation recently of former Shelby County Health director Alisa Haushalter has been filled, at least temporarily.

Mayor Lee Harris announced Tuesday, March 9th, that Dr. LaSonya Harris Hall has been appointed interim director of the Shelby County Health Department. Hall currently serves as deputy Chief Administrative Officer for Shelby County government. She has previously served in various leadership capacities with the city of Memphis, Leadership Memphis, and Shelby County Schools.

Hall has also served in a managerial role with the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. She is expected to serve up to 90 days as Shelby County Health Department director, until a permanent director is named, and will meanwhile help lead the search for a permanent director.

City of Memphis/Facebook

Shelby County Health Department director Dr. Alisa Haushalter during Tuesday’s COVID-19 Task Force briefing.

Virus trends here are headed in a “positive direction,” according to officials with the Shelby County Health Department (SCHD), and they now calculate a virus surge — if one comes at all — would arrive in March 2021.

Virus numbers rose slightly after the Labor Day weekend holiday but have returned to a downward trend, said SCHD director Dr. Alisa Haushalter. The average of new cases reported daily over the last week has been 128.

The reproductive rate of the virus has returned to below one. That means every one person with the virus is now spreading it (statistically speaking) to fewer than one other person, which shows the transmission of the virus is slowing.

The numbers pushed the department’s calculations of a surge — when we could see more than 300 COVID-19 hospitalizations in a day — out to March of next year. The new numbers, she said, are very small compared to the department’s original calculations.

“If we continue in the direction we’re going, we will continue to flatten that [epidemic] curve and we may not have a surge we were all concerned about in the beginning,” Haushalter said. “March is a potential [for a surge] but if we can bring our numbers down, we can avoid a surge.”