WATCH: City of Huntsville news conference on coronavirus response

WATCH: City of Huntsville news conference on coronavirus response

We are breaking into your normal programming >> we're braking into our break news in madison county.

>> new information on the city's response plan during the coronavirus outbreak.

Let's listen in.

>> mr. birdwell: spillers, huntsville hospital, mayor tommy battle, city of huntsville and mary ellen judah from neighborhood concepts.

Again, you will notice that we are sitting at least six feet apart, abiding by cdc guidelines and our own best practices to sanitize and separate.

I'll begin with a brief update of the information that we have now.

Currently in the state of alabama there are 167 confirmed cases and 17 of those confirmed cases are in madison county.

Again, we continue to monitor this very closely and respond accordingly.

With that said, i'll turn it over to mr. spillers from huntsville hospital.

[off mic] thank you.

Good morning.

We continue to make preparations in the event that we have a significant influx of inpatients.

At this point we only have 2 hospitalized patients.

Those 2 are at madison, one's at huntsville.

Of the confirmed cases out there, we continue to see them go home and self quarantine.

A trend we would like to see continue.

Over the past two weeks we've been working to reduce the census in our hospitals in the event that there's a need for significant hospitalization.

Overall when you look at our entire system of hospitals, the census a week ago was about 1200 patients.

We're down to about 850 today.

So we'll continue to work that number down to make sure there's capacity in the event we need those beds.

We've acquired numerous respirators.

Have about 300 system- wide so we'll continue to grow that number, if at all possible, by working with local surgery centers and others to get the machines that they have and have them available, if needed.

Our testing centers are popular.

The flu and fever clinic saw about 200 plus patients on friday.

Our drive-through clinic at john hunt park saw about 75 and another 40 or so that came that did not have a fix order.

Today we added a -- we are using a commercial lab for those tests.

I want to thank our industry and manufacturers and businesses in town.

They have been very gracious to look through their supplies and they -- many of them have masks, many have safety goggles and those types of things that are not in use right now or they have or they can donate for health care workers.

Again, the more inpatients we have, the more we will distribute additional supplies internally to protect our workers.

So i've got many, many companies in town calling, asking how they can help, can we manufacture things, can we make things and we've got our supply chains and logistics people looking at all of those opportunities to develop as much of the supplies locally as we can in the event that we need those i can continually ask how is our supply -- how are our supplies right now?

Right now we have adequate supplies onhand and we continue to receive some shipments.

So right now it's not a concern.

As mentioned in previous press conferences, when these patients are in- house they require an enormous amount of supply, protective -- personal protective equipment.

That's when we start worrying about whether we have enough or not.

So all of our work right now to acquire and store as much supplies as possible is -- we're doing that to prepare for an influx of inpatients when and if they come.

So that's what's going on there.

I believe that's it.

Again, we have some questions.

Thank you.

>> mr. birdwell: thank you, mr. spillers.

We'll go to huntsville mayor, tommy battle.

>> mayor battle: thank you.

And to everybody out there, thank you for the work y'all have done.

Everybody has done a great job of making us get through and helping us get through this.

There are feeding stations going on for children in the schools at four different sites right now.

Public housing has feeding boxes that are being passed out at different -- at two different sites right now in conjunction with the food bank in our community development offices.

Those that are hit the hardest in this have been the restaurant hospitality industry.

And those that have -- have -- have had to work harder are the grocery industry.

One of the things that we -- we got a notice on friday that kroger's is hiring.

They need people to keep -- kees full.

That may be some relief to some of the people in the restaurant business.

They can find a job at a kroger's.

Publix is hiring, too.

You can go on websites and look at both their websites and you can even, with publix, you can pick out which store you want to work at.

And, you know, it's a good way to transition a workforce over to another side that actually needs workers right now.

You know, construction and manufacturing is on going.

The city of huntsville is open.

We are still issuing permits.

We're still picking up garbage today and picking up the leaf items. we still have people out there working.

We have officers patrolling.

So we will stay open through this and we are working -- working with everybody as much as we can.

You know, unnormallal times.

This is, you know -- but we want to be as normal as we can during these unnormallal times.

I encourage everybody to work with -- in the community, to exercise their option and not only have tuesday and thursday take-out day where you support the local restaurants who are open and who are providing take-out and delivery, but make it monday, tuesday, wednesday, thursday, friday take-out day.

That is something that is helping the restaurants to stay open we did it last night as a number of people were doing it last night.

I think it's something good for the community and helps some of our local businesses to stay open.

You know, all of our efforts right now are to flatten the curve, to make sure that we don't have that spike that -- that will overwhelm the hospital industry and the hospital personnel.

And dr -- mr. spillers has done a great job doing -- making sure that huntsville hospital is ready.

You're ready for everything, but you just don't know how much to be ready for.

And that's the big question, and that's what we're looking at.

But i assure you one thing, you know, when we get down to the end of it, when we get to the end of it, we will be getting back to business and when we get back to -- back to business there will be pent up demand, there will still be people moving here to take the jobs that we have brought to the area , there will still be houses to be built, apartments to be built, commercial buildings to be built so they can work out of and we will be back to an operational facility.

The big question is how long?

There are about 20 different answer toss that.

Depends on which expert you want to listen to.

We're going to go day-to-day and week-to-week and we'll move through this as we go week-to-week.

This weekend we had a -- we had a call with the big ten mayors from the ten largest cities with senator jones.

He was able to fill us in with what is happening in washington or his frustration of what is not happening.

But it sounds like we're on the road to getting some relief from washington.

But also, you know, we've still got a lot of work to do ourselves.

We are not going to depend on washington, d.c.

We're going to take care of ourselves here in madison county and in the city of huntsville.

We will take care of our own needs as much as possible.

Challenges right now is -- you know, is making sure that we have adequate supplies.

If we do get a spike, we're hoping not to have that spike.

And finally, you know, we really have to thank our community.

Thank our community for responding so well.

We are not other communities that you have seen.

Everybody has pretty much acted very responsibly and has separated and sanitized and made sure that we're ready for the next steps that are coming.

We have several more weeks to get through to make this work for us.

But at the end of this there will be light at the end of the tunnel and there will be life at the end of the tunnel and we will continue to move on.

At the end of this we will -- you know, we will have people moving here.

At the end of this we will have stores open up , we will have restaurants reopen, and we will be back to somewhat the quasi normal.

But we'll always remember the unnormal times.

So the next two to three weeks will be a test of all of us.

Test of endurance, a test of patience, a test of me and ms. battle staying in the same house together for 14 days and being -- being able to have a good conversation with each other or maybe be silent a little bit.

But i think it will be a good test of all of us.

But at the end, there is light at the end of the tunnel and there is a time when we will get back to what we would call the new near normal >> mr. birdwell: thank you, mayor battle.

We'll go to mary ellen judah from neighborhood concepts.

>> ms. judah: thank you, jeff.

As a quick introduction to neighborhood concepts , we are a nonprofit with a 30-year history of strengthening neighborhoods through the development of affordable housing and the advancement of economic opportunity.

The second half of that mission we really cover through our resolving -- revolving loan fund that provides loans to small business has the aren't ready for traditional loans.

As you are aware it's the small businesses in our community that are really struggling right now.

Any variability in their business model can be very disruptive for them and so s.b.a.

Has announced their emergency disaster loan program which we would encourage businesses that will qualify for that to explore that option.

Also, businesses that have existing relationships with financial institutions, contact your banks and your credit unions to see what they are offering to help your small businesses.

For those of those that may not qualify for some of those other programs out there, we recognize that there was going to be a need and so on friday neighborhood concepts board of directors authorized an emergency line of credit loan product that we could offer to small businesses throughout the north alabama region it will be structured as a $25,000 non revolving line of credit that can be used for working capital so that's to buy supplies, to pay salaries, that's to pay rent, for any businesses that can demonstrate that they have been impacted by covid-19.

Businesses will need to be -- have demonstrate that they've been in business for at least 12 months and there will be some eligibility requirement.

We are structuring it as six months interest only at the end of that six- month term we will convert it to monthly payments and interest rate of fixed at 5%.

So we are -- appreciate the opportunity to offer this in the north alabama region.

Wrer sanitizing and separating as well alt our office.

So we are trying to figure out some of how the logistics of this.

As of right now you can certainly call our office.

All of our staff members have access to email and voicemail, but we hope to have it up on our website www.

Neighborhoodconcept s.org within the next day or so.

>> mayor battle: and i'd like to piggyback on that and say thank you to neighborhood concepts.

Thank you for coming up with this.

This will help our small businesses out there.

We have been talking to our banking community across the valley and they have got some great programs in place.

But those programs in place have structure to them and a lot of them have so much structure to them that neighborhood concepts will be able to fill a gap in there.

So mary ellen, thank you and thank to you the board for the job you will be doing.

>> ms. judah: thank you.

>> mr. birdwell: thank you for watching today.

We will be back here again tomorrow at noon for another daily briefing.

Until then, critical updates will be posted to city of huntsville's covid-19 web page as well as the websites of our other partners here today.

Until then, stay safe, stay separate, and remember to sanitize.

At this point we will open it up for questions we do ask when you come to the mic, please identify yourself and who you are affiliated with and also we'll allow one question and a follow-up.

>> nolan crain, news reporter with waff48.

The question is with regards to the people who have confirmed cases of cor, are we going to be releasing information as to where they have been, where they have traveled to, where they have shopped, public events they may have been attendance to so people at home will be able to know wait, i was there as well.

>> mr. spillers: anytime that we identify someone who's test positive, there's a series of questions that we go through to try to backtrack over a period of time who they may have come in contact with and we reach out to all those people to try to make sure they get tested.

If someone walked through a mall with 100 people we're never going to get in touch with those people, but close contact, family members, workers, others that may have come in contact to them, reach out to them to try to get them in and get them tested.

Clearly family members we always get the family members in to be tested.

>> paul gattis from al.

Com for mr. spillers and also for mayor battle.

Mr. spillers, would you describe the process of getting a lot of feed back from the community as far as donations of equipment that y'all need?

I know athens limestone hospital put out a plea yesterday on facebook for any donations.

Governor cuomo in new york yesterday said the states are competing against each other to get this equipment n.

This whole context i'm just wondering how satisfied you are with the process to secure what your hospital system needs.

And mayor battle, i just wondered -- you talked about speaking with senator jones, what role you can play or your satisfaction level in trying to make this process work efficiently because alt this point it doesn't seem, at least to me, doesn't seem terribly efficient.

>> mr. spillers: that's a multi- -part question.

Multiple answers to that i will say, there was a -- something that was on social media ability huntsville hospital asking people to donate supplies and somehow or another it got twisted into a bad thing.

We have an adequate amount of supplies today hat we're worried about is a week, ten days from now, if we have a huge influx of patients and the concern that the supply chain, which is feeding us supplies today, somehow gets cut off because everybody in the country has a huge spike.

So, you know, e we're more than willing to accept n95 masks, gowns, goggles, what people have that they're not going to use and put them in our stockpile in the event we need them and in the event our supply line does get cutoff for some reason or supplies become short right now we're reaching out both locally and into distributors that we use throughout the year and we're trying to acquire supplies.

We believe we've been able to go out and bring in some additional masks that should be here this week and gowns, as i mentioned in previous conversations we've -- two, three weeks ago wur purchased 5,000 disposable garments that we're going to put into place and start using.

So i wish people wouldn't make this a bad thing.

It's not that we aren't providing supplies and equipment to our employees now.

We're doing that.

This is in the event it runs short.

We don't want to then have to go look for it then because manufacturers can't supply us.

So i think it's a very proactive approach, and i feel very good that the community wants to help us and say hey, i've got these.

I'm not going to use them.

Put them in stockpile if you need them.

So that's the current status.

And again, i reiterate, today we're fine.

And looking down at current utilization, particularly the fact that our census is dropping, we've only got 3 inpatients, things look really good.

We're just preparing for what might happen in the event we have a lot of inpatients.

>> mayor battle: and let me say this, the hospitals have been very forward-looking.

They have looked way ahead.

The problems that they foresee are problems if -- if the spike comes and if the spike is very excessive.

And we have done everything we can to stop that spike.

We've, you know, closed the restaurants, we've -- no groups of over 25 gathering, social distancing and put out the word, and we have an intelligent community who has done a very good job of it.

You'll see a case every once in a while somebody not doing it and, you know, everybody can't be a rocket scientist so we'll just go from there but, you know, portions of what we're going to have to do is also supplies, the supply chain coming into grocery stores right now it was getting hit pretty hard on the weekend.

If you went and shopped over the weekend it got hit hard.

They build up over the week and get hit hard on the weekend.

So far we have done very well on that and we're trying to backfill some of that supply line and some of that labor force that needs to be in there.

Feeding of those less fortunate has been something that we want to make sure that we continue to do.

As i understand it right now, the huntsville city schools, madison county schools, madison city schools are still feeding separate sites.

Our community development is working along with the food bank to pass out boxes of food that can be cooked forsome of those and some of the public housing areas.

So i think that at this point we are very fortunate to have this community that almost overruns you with people wanting to help.

And this case is different.

You can't get a lot of people together and get them want to help.

You've got to move them separately and move them in onesies and two situations, together so we don't aid the spread of this virus.

So it's a different a different kind of response that we're asking from people, but everybody from the faith community to the civic clubs to -- to just different groups that are here, everybody has -- is kind of reaching out and i want to be part of the answer to the solution.

I don't want to be part of the problem.

And we have been very fortunate to have that in our community.

>> mr. spillers, just a quick follow-up.

I'll try to make this a lot shorter than the last question.

But simply put, how keen is the competition to get the equipment that your hospitals need?

>> mr. spillers: well again, it's actually a multi-part answer to that.

Testing is in limited supply nationwide.

We have one of the largest hospital-based labs in the nation and are capable of doing covid-19 testing here if we had the processing material from the vendors that supply us, and nationally those materials have been allocated elsewhere in the country to hot spots so.

That is a limited supply of material that is impacting our ability to do local testing in our own lab.

We were in conversations last week with u.a.b.

Who could also do the same thing and collectively we hope u.

A.b.

And huntsville will be able to pull down some of those materials and start doing in-house testing which would be very good for us.

It would allow us to move again -- die they aricics is doing a great job and we'd add another layer if we were able to do another testing 24/7 when we have another possible case.

I think the areas what i'll call hotspot areas, new york being probably the biggest one in the country and in alabama maybe opelika we have almost 20 inpatients, i believe, in the hospital down there and they're not a very large hospital.

So right now, they have to get supplies.

They're treating the patients.

Those supply chain -- the distribution of supplies to the supply chains are allocated to some degree to the hot spots.

Again, we continue to get what we need.

We're not getting extra.

If we order extra, unless we go outside our typical supply chain and go direct to a vendor or direct to somebody in china, believe it or not they still manufacture a lot of stuff there and that's whether it comes from.

We might have to go direct to get some of that.

We've reached out and taken that chance to do that and hopefully it will get here on a boat.

But it's a complex equation right now.

Our health care system is not built to address the magnitude of what this could be, whether it be supplies, personnel, hospital beds , respirators, et cetera, et cetera.

And i'm not sure the country could afford to just have all this stuff waiting around for the next pandemic.

I mean, it's an enormous amount of resources.

But what we've got to do as a country is gear up and start manufacturing and manufacturing them real quickly.

We have to look locally to manufacturers that can supply some of this stuff that could change from making whatever they're making previously to this and start making some of that material for us.

That's the way we're going to address this, is depending upon ourself toss do it, i think.

Not rely on the outside world to get us the stuff we need.

It will become in short er supply the longer this goes on and the more people we have in the hospital.

Sorry, i don't think i have a short answer for anything.

If y'all can ask me a yes or no question i'll be glad to give you a yes or no.

>> kelly smith with whnt news 19.

I think this is for dr. spillers.

You know, right now we have 17 cases in madison county.

Would you be able to describe what you're seeing in terms of the number of doctors requesting covid-19 test s and the amount of people who are fitting the criteria for testing >> mr. spillers: well, you know, right now the criteria -- i can speak to our clinics.

We get people from other locations to be tested in our clinics in the hospital, and physicians are looking at whether or not a patient has the symptoms that need to be tested, whether they're in an age group that creates some concern.

I believe it's appropriate right now.

I don't think we're testing any people that don't need testing right now.

So i don't see a problem with who's being tested.

What's the rest of your question?

I was trying to -- >> basically how much is that number going up?

>> mr. spillers: oh, it's going up.

I mean, as we made testing available the end of last week we started testing far more people and, you know, those -- we're still not getting many positive results for the number of people we're testing.

We all expect that to go up and we expect the more people we test, the more people we'll find positive.

But, you know, right now the -- the numbers that we're testing versus the numb wees that come back positive are still very small.

And the ones that are coming back positive generally go home and self-quarantine.

We're not finding many patients that are so sick on an outpatient basis that they're tested and admitted.

The ones that are in the hospital that have tested and we found have covid-19 were already in the hospital when we tested them.

They weren't admitted after a test.

>> and given that, given the way you described the situation, what does that say about case growth in the coming days and weeks and i know we've been talking about this but how would you characterize your readiness level?

>> mr. spillers: well, you know, again, i hope that we continue on the path that a majority of the cases can go home and self- quarantine.

What that tells me is high-risk patients are being very careful.

If high-risk patients continue to be very careful and stay at home and self-quarantine and don't go out and have somebody deliver grocery toss them and all those types of things, i think our nursing homes and assisted living facilities early on quit allowing people to visit i think that has helped us from getting those really serious acute cases.

So i think what we've done as a community is showing in our numbers.

Now, again, as we continue to test people over the next few weeks, we'll find more and more cases.

Would not surprise me.

I can't predict whether we'll have a peak and all of a sudden there will be a huge number of inpatients that need to be admitted or not.

I'm not the right one to ask to estimate that.

>> thank you.

>> sydney martin, channel 31.

My first question, a follow-up from what she had just asked, mr. spillers.

You said that nobody was admitted, they already were in the hospital and then they were fested to have it.

So had they been in the hospital and you weren't aware of what they had?

Can you maybe clarify that?

>> mr. spillers: they came in the hospital for other reasons and we tested them when they came to the hospital.

The patients that we have that are in our hospital that have it have other health care issues.

So there were distributing -- contributing factors as to why they were admitted to the hospital i don't have the specifics on all three, but i know two of the three were there admitted for a totally different reason when we tested the other one came to the hospital because of something else and we tested and found that they had covid-19.

>> so do you think they had it before they came in?

I guess i'm just confused a little bit.

>> mr. spillers: your guess is as good as mine.

I assume they probably had it.

There's a long incubation period on this so they were probably in contact with somebody previously and then it developed when they got to us.

>> can then my actual question, the drive- through clinics, we saw a shift from people need ago prescription or doctor's order to now they can just show expup there's a physician there.

Why the shift now?

>> mr. spillers: well, we had hoped that people who needed a physician order would go to the flu clinic that we set up and that's still seeing far more patients than our drive-up clinic.

When we opened the drive -up clinic as much as you helped us try to publicize you had to have a physician order, people still showed up without a physician order.

We said, you know, rather than frustrate people, let's reallocate a physician up there and give them an order if they have symptoms. if somebody shows up and hey, i want to be tested , you're not going to.

If you have symptoms and get a physician order then you get tested.

>> i saw nurses showing they're making their own masks because they think this personal protective equipment would run out.

If they made masks would they be able to use those at work?

>> mr. spillers: there are certain criteria those masks had to reach f.

We got to a point that we had a short damage the cdc has said what's allowable for a mask and anything is better than nothing.

I have seen people walk around the hospital with colorful masks on.

We're not going to tell them to take them off.

That's okay.

If you want to go home and knit a mask, sow a mask and put it on,, a little bit is better.

Everybody could do that.

No harm, no foul.

>> mr. birdwell: we'll have one last question submitted electronically and this is for mr. spillers.

It's a two-part question is the huntsville hospital foundation helping with supplies and has the hospital gotten any doarch nations to help with getting equipment, the hospital needs?

>> mr. spillers: yeah.

Organizations reached out to our foundation to see how they could help.

They started coordinating an effort to allow people to donate supplies that had those.

Goes back to my earlier comments about companies that had available masks and other types of protective equipment that they weren't using.

So that is an option for people to contact the foundation if they want to donate.

They'll coordinate that with our supply chain people.

Again, that was not something that we really thought about going out and asking the community to do.

Community organizations came to us and said what can we do to help and we said, you know, that will be great.

That will help us build our stockpile in case we need it at a later date.

>> mr. birdwell: all right.

At this point that will conclude this press conference.

We appreciate everybody coming.

Thank you.

Realtime closed captioning provg tennesseecaptioning.com .

>> and you have been watching what has become a daily briefing for huntsville madison county officials.

I get the sense, maria it was about the three c 's, calm, collected and confident as we're going into another week and people have to be prepared of what's ahead of them.

There you saw our city leaders talking about what's ahead for huntsville and madison county.

You saw from ceo david spillers talking about the lowering of the census count at huntsville hospital from 1200 patients to 800 patients.

Getting ready for a potential influx, if you will, of what's ahead.

He also talked about the testing centers that have become very popular more people are trying to test.

Also, they're stockpil ing for what's ahead in the future.

He didn't say we're trying to just massively coming up with all these stockpiles.

Just in case.

Try to be very, very proactive there.

>> absolutely.

You heard from huntsville mayor tommy battle talking about what they already have in place.

They set up these plans last week and this week we're talking about the feeding stations for area school kids that may be going without meals for these next few weeks.

There's four feeding stations that are out in our community right now.

Public housing passing out food boxes for those who need it most during this time, talking about the impacts, the grocery industry.

We've all been to stores we all understand how quickly those shelves, how bare they are right now.

They're actually needing to hire people, he spoke on that as far as their sense of needing more manpower in there.

Also, the impacts on these local restaurants and how we need to do what we can hopefully to help them stay afloat and support local.

He did mention, too, at this time city hall remains open, trash pick up remains as normal you can still get your permits, apply, everything you can do, you're just asked to do it online and over the phone if possible.

>> absolutely.

You talked about the restaurants.

Those small businesses that need help.

We know that.

And they were trying to put some information out there, like mary an judah with the neighborhood concepts.

Talk about the s.b.a.

Is offering emergency loans for small businesses.

Also, contact your bank.

Find out what's available out there to kind of help get you through this tough time.

And also she talked about the time that neighborhood concepts is offering a loan of up to $25,000, non revolving loan.

They have specific guidelines that go with that.

But there is help out there that they're just trying to make sure that everybody knows about.

>> and we got those latest numbers at the end of waay 31 news.

167 cases confirmed here in alabama.

The latest numbers that came out during the 11:00 hour.

17 on record in madison county.

2 in lauderdale county.

1 each in limestone and jackson county.

>> keeping a close watch of not only the coronavirus and what's happening here in north alabama and the response to it, but that storm system that's going to be moving through tomorrow.

So we'll keep a close watch of that.

All these things later on today.

Our next newscast comes your way waay31 midday news.

Any news that's breaking out we