From County Executive Pittman:
Governor Hogan inched forward today on the Maryland Roadmap to Recovery, allowing the lifting of some restrictions in places where local health officials believe that metrics have been achieved. In the coming days I will review the proposals with our Health Officer and announce which ones we will implement in our county.
This is where we at the local level must balance public health risks against economic and quality of life needs. These should not be political decisions, and they should not be taken lightly. They should be based on data and metrics.
Here is where we stand:
- Starting today, we became the first county in Maryland to publish our COVID-19 hospital census figures. We have been holding steady since mid-April, which is good news, but not great news. We want to see the numbers decline.
- PPE stocks in our hospitals and elsewhere are not yet at the 14-day supply level that we’d like to see, but we are better off than we were two weeks ago.
- Testing capacity is growing slowly, much too slowly. The 500,000 test kits from South Korea need swabs and reagents, so our county is looking elsewhere. We hope to report good news on that front soon.
- The one area where our county is head and shoulders above the rest of the state and country is our extraordinary Contact Tracing and Case Management program. We trace every positive case and manage their isolation.
Those are the four pillars that the Governor’s Roadmap to Recovery identifies as the metrics to track. We are also looking for decreases in new cases and deaths, and progress in our health equity initiative.
As County Executive, one of my primary duties is to protect our residents from the economic impacts of this crisis. Our Food Assistance efforts and our Eviction Prevention Program are central to that work, but I must also help our small businesses to reopen without generating a second spike in the pandemic.
That's why tomorrow I will announce Anne Arundel County's small business Customer and Employee Protection (CEP) grant program. It will provide businesses with funds to implement public health best practices so that they can reopen both sooner and safer.