[JSH]

Originally Posted by Piotrsko

Actually at this time the testing is so fubared up the results are all over the place. Then there is the question whether or not the antibody actually last.

Dr. Scott Harris on Sunday talking about why they feel confident reopen Alabama. (He's the state health officer for the Alabama Department of Public Health)


CHUCK TODD:
Dr. Harris, since Alabama's doing a little more opening right now than Michigan. Although you're -- compared to some of your southern neighbors, I would argue you guys are being a bit more cautious than others. But tell me the metrics you used that gave you the confidence to advise the governor at beginning some phased-in reopenings?

DR. SCOTT HARRIS:
Sure. So we have followed a number of metrics like, I think most states have, including the White House plan for reopening. The gating criteria that I'm sure you talked about many times on this show were certainly part of the things that we considered. We have not fully satisfied all of those gating criteria in terms of cases per day. But we felt very good about our syndromic surveillance numbers. We felt very good about our hospital capacity. And so what our governor chose to do was to make a very measured step, a very gradual reopening of certain types of businesses. We did not proceed to a full phase-one reopening like was in the White House plan. Things like entertainment venues and gyms and in-person dining. We have not chosen to do that so far. But we think this is just a gradual first step.

CHUCK TODD:

What data are you missing, Dr. Harris, that you wish you had but you just -- whether it's capacity or other reasons you don't have?

DR. SCOTT HARRIS:

I think, clearly, we would like to make sure we're testing to the level that we would like. We probably have a total amount of laboratory bench capacity to do the number of tests that we would like to do. But those tests are really unevenly distributed throughout the state. If you're in a bigger, more urbanized part of our state like Jefferson County where Birmingham is located or Madison County where Huntsville is located you can probably have really good access to testing whenever you like. Butin some of our more rural parts of the state, we are able to get testing done, but there are definitely barriers there for people to obtain that, particularly if they have to find transportation or they don't have ready access to a health care provider. And we've also been surprised to find that we have not necessarily gotten negative test results reported to us. It's hard to come up with a good denominator so that we know the percent positive of tests we have. And so we have reached out to all the labs who report to us. But many of them are out of state. And it's just difficult to get all that information.


Summary:

• We didn't hit our self-determined criteria to reopen but we are doing it anyway
• We feel confident in surveillance numbers but people in rural areas are still having a hard time getting tested
• We don't know how many people we have tested or if the positive percentage is going up of down.