Late last week, Dr. Jon McCullers took a look at the local hospitalization data and thought, “Welp, that looks really bad.”
As can be seen in the graph below, the number of confirmed COVID-19 hospitalizations rocketed on June 10, after slowly climbing the two weeks prior.
McCullers — an expert on influenza pandemics for the University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC) and an advisor for Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris and Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland on the pandemic — realized then that if the number didn’t come down over the weekend, the county’s third reopening phase would have to be delayed.
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