1 Year Later: Health officials reflect on COVID’s impact on West Tennessee

JACKSON, Tenn. — On this day one year ago, West Tennessee Healthcare and the Jackson-Madison County Regional Health Department held their first press conference regarding the coronavirus.

WBBJ 7 Eyewitness News Reporter Julia Ewoldt takes us back, and asks the new question, ‘Is there light at the end of the tunnel?’

“It could be here and us just not know it yet. So, you need to have a personal plan in place for you and your family,” Jackson-Madison County Regional Health Department Regional Director Kim Tedford announced in March 2020.

March 12, 2020 — there wasn’t even a confirmed case of coronavirus in all of West Tennessee. But West Tennessee Healthcare and the Jackson-Madison County Regional Health Department started making preparations.

“For parts of it, I think we were, because a lot of the contact tracing and those parts of the disease we were already doing every day, that people don’t realize that we do,” Tedford said. “But to do it for a global pandemic? No.”

“The unknown is what comes back to me, because at that point, we didn’t really know how deadly the virus was going to be,” said Amy Garner, chief compliance and communication officer for West Tennessee Healthcare. “[We] didn’t know how we were going to treat the patients, and we certainly had no idea that we were going to have the peak we had in cases that we had around the holidays.”

Now one year later, the health departmtent reports 198 people in Madison County have died due to the coronavirus, and the state says 1,241 people have died in our region.

“At beginning of the pandemic, you would hear people say or put on social media, ‘I don’t know anybody who has had COVID-19.’ You know, I would dare say that you could find anybody in Madison Co. who could say, ‘I don’t know anybody who has not been affected by COVID 19,'” Tedford said.

Plus, West Tennessee Healthcare reports they’ve cared for over 17% of the hospitalized patients statewide.

“I think that is a testament to the leadership of our organization, by being to serve the entire community,” Garner said.

Now one year after that initial announcement was made, Kim Tedford and Amy Garner say there’s a feeling of hope in the air, and maybe we’re on that downhill slope of the curve they talked so much about flattening.

“We have flattened the curve, when you look at those numbers of new cases, when you look at those numbers in the hospital,” Tedford said.

“When we started giving the antibodies regularly, and when we started giving the vaccine regularly, you can see a sharp decrease in the number of hospitalizations, and that in turn leads to a decrease in the number of COVID deaths,” Garner said.

The health department says almost a quarter of Madison County residents have received the first dose of the vaccine, and that’s going to be the key in ending this pandemic.

“So, our focus now is to get that vaccine out, get those people vaccinated,” Tedford said. “Those vaccines are 100% effective in preventing severe illness and keeping people out of the hospital.”

Even then, if the pandemic hasn’t affected you physically, it might have emotionally. And because of that, we still have a long way to go — especially for the people on the front lines.

“Because you can’t go through something like this, and you can’t see that kind of death, and you can’t go through working as hard as these people have worked to try to take care of these very sick patients without having some sort of trauma,” Garner said.

“There’s been a lot that’s taken place in this year, a whole lot, and we’re glad to be where we are right now,” Teford said.

The health department says they’re now vaccinating 700 people a day, Monday through Saturday.

So even now that the contact tracing has slowed down, things are still just as busy.