COVID-19 cases rose in Alabama by 326 Saturday, bringing the state’s total to 11,699. Two more deaths in Jefferson County brought the state’s toll to 485, according to the Alabama Department of Public Health’s COVID-19 Data and Surveillance Dashboard. Read more.
In the month before Alia Tunagur reached her 30th birthday, she easily could have questioned whether she would make it to that milestone. “To be honest,” she said, “I wouldn’t let my mind go there.” It was during that final month of her 29th year that Tunagur, a health care professional in Birmingham, battled the novel coronavirus. Born in Saudi Arabia, Tunagur celebrated her latest birthday on May 2 and continues to celebrate having successfully run the gauntlet known around the world as COVID-19. It is a sickness unlike any she had ever experienced. Tunagur remembers March 15, the first day she realized something was wrong “It was just different,” she said. “It was cold/flu-like but I was hypervigilant and overly concerned because I knew that I have a compromised immune system (because of an) autoimmune disorder.” Taking no chances, she isolated herself in the basement apartment at her parents’ house. Her sinuses were congested, her throat was sore, and she was exhausted despite having had a full night of sleep. “I had a feeling,” she said, “that things weren't normal.” Read more.
Alabama had 11,373 confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus Friday night, 272 more cases than the day before, according to the Alabama Department of Public Health’s COVID-19 Data and Surveillance Dashboard. Ten people died of the disease Friday, bringing the state’s total deaths to 483. All but 21 of those people had one or more underlying health conditions, which puts people at a higher risk of death from the disease. Read more.
A recent survey by the Alabama Nursing Association shows that nurses on the frontlines of the COVID-19 battle have been concerned about a lack of personal protection equipment, their own health, taking the virus home to their families and having the needed time to spend with patients isolated from their loved ones. Others, furloughed by public health orders that stopped elective surgeries and procedures, worried about paying their bills and even their own health insurance. Read more.
Hurricane season starts June 1. That’s nothing new for those who live along the Gulf Coast, but what is new this year is that hurricane season will happen during the coronavirus pandemic. Read more.
Alabama had 11,101 confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus Thursday night after hitting 10,000 cases on Monday. Of those cases, 2,899 were diagnosed in the past 14 days, according to the Alabama Department of Public Health’s COVID-19 Data and Surveillance Dashboard. Deaths in the state have risen to 473, up 23 from a day before. In addition, 401 people were hospitalized with COVID-19 on Thursday. Since the pandemic began, the virus has put 1,364 people in the hospital. Read more.
MONTGOMERY — A week after a public dispute between Gov. Kay Ivey and members of the Legislature about who should control about $1.8 billion in federal coronavirus relief money, the governor on Thursday sent lawmakers a detailed proposal for allocating most of it. The proposed expenditures include money for state agencies' COVID-19 expenses, businesses, nonprofits and faith-based groups and technology and infrastructure expenses. Read more.
Pricing and processing delays caused by the coronavirus pandemic have made a direct hit on the Alabama cattle and poultry industries. Those were more problems that farmers did not need in the wake of tariffs President Trump imposed on China in 2018 and the swath cut by Hurricane Michael on South Alabama farmlands last year. “A lot of different things have affected the farmers,” said state Agriculture Commissioner Rick Pate, himself a cattle farmer. About 600,000 people in Alabama are involved in the farming industry. That includes row crop, fruit and vegetable farmers as well as beef and poultry farmers. It’s unclear whether row crop farmers will take a major hit this year. Prices for crops are low now, according to agriculture officials, but a lot depends on whether that remains true through the fall harvest. On the produce side of the table, it appears the pandemic won’t have as big an impact on Alabama’ fruits and vegetables farmers, because most of those crops are sold direct to consumers. A new website, Sweet Grown Alabama, was launched recently to connect consumers with farmers and ease the process of buying and selling produce. Read more.
The efforts to reopen Alabama’s economy continue this week, as Gov. Kay Ivey relaxed more regulations in her “Safer-at-Home” initiative. In the process of deciding what to open and when, state and health officials continue to look at data to see what effects the regulations have on the number of COVID-19 cases reported and deaths attributed to the disease. The question is: which pieces of data are government officials using to gauge the effects? The Alabama Department of Public Health’s COVID-19 web page shows the raw number of cases and deaths continue to increase, and the number of additional cases each day has been 221 or more for the seven-day period of May 7-13. But another way to look for trends is to use the percentage increase in cases and deaths. Read more.
About 1.4 million Alabama households have turned in their 2020 census forms, a state self-response rate of 56.7% compared to a national rate of 58.6%, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. State agencies are now putting extra effort in those parts of the state where responses are lagging. A swath of Black Belt and southern counties, and a few in north Alabama, are trailing in mail-in, internet and telephone replies, according to a map maintained by the Census Bureau. Early this week, Coosa County in central Alabama had the lowest return rate at 26.6%. The response rate data is based on 2018 and 2019 population estimates. Census kickoff efforts in March and April got off to a slow start because of the coronavirus. Read more and see interactive map.
