Useful links during COVID-19

Published 9:09 am Wednesday, April 1, 2020

Living in fear and fueling your panic is not the way to be with COVID-19; awareness, however, is a different story.

While it can feel frightening to see the number of cases, and even the number of deaths rise, this can be eye-opening into the gravity of the virus.

Johns Hopkins University and Medicine has released an interactive map to follow worldwide coronavirus cases. The website breaks down the number of cases by country, with a special tab for the United States that shows individual states. To visualize the amount of cases in areas, the website provides red dots over affected areas as well.

According to Dr. Arnold Hopland, owner of Medical Care, this is useful for showing the travel of the virus.

“This is really traveling everywhere,” he said. “There are no states where there are no infections. But there are states where you would be safer than others. I would say East Tennessee is safer than New York City, Los Angeles or New Orleans. I would stay away from those areas unless you absolutely have to go there. If you have to go there I would say get out as fast as you can.”

This map can be found at https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html.

For information on numbers and more local resources, the best website to go to is the Tennessee Department of Health. This provides information on latest news from Governor Lee, as well as county by county breakdowns of the virus. Numbers of cases in Tennessee are updated daily. Phone numbers for information on the virus are also given here. This is found at https://www.tn.gov/health/cedep/ncov.html.

For information surrounding scenarios, guidelines and symptoms, the Centers for Disease Control is also a reliable source. The CDC is currently providing guidelines that businesses and educators are following to ensure safety. These are regularly updated, and information is simply broken down for summary. This can be found at https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/index.html.

“Whenever we are asked by a citizen if they should be worried about COVID-19, our response is that they should be worried enough to practice social distancing and seek out credible information on the pandemic, especially from the Tennessee Department of Health and CDC COVID-19 webpages,” said Dr. David Kirschke, Medical Director for the Northeast Tennessee Regional Health Department.