Nashville to relax restrictions

NASHVILLE — The mayor of Tennessee’s capital city said he plans to roll back restrictions that have shuttered bars, allowing them to reopen starting Monday with strict limits in place.

Nashville Mayor John Cooper said Thursday that bars in the popular tourist destination could soon reopen to a maximum of 25 people if social distancing is possible at those levels.

Restaurants and bars will have to close by 10:30 p.m. and enforcement teams will be patrolling businesses to see whether they are complying with the various requirements, Cooper said.

The mayor said Nashville’s hospitality industry has been especially hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic, particularly small neighborhood bars and restaurants. Still, he said he hopes that a well-managed bar or restaurant will be better than a backyard party of 25 people, which he said “probably will have a more relaxed atmosphere.”

“We should adjust our response where we safely can, based on the best public health information available, to help businesses survive,” Cooper said.

Cooper in early July announced a rollback of Nashville’s reopening, including an order for bars to close again due to the heightened spread of the virus. Then in late July, Cooper moved to require restaurants, restaurants that have turned into bars during the pandemic and other businesses that serve alcohol to close by 10 p.m.

Nearly 65 school districts have started the school year as of Aug. 7, with the majority of them starting inperson classes, The Tennessean reported. At least 39 confirmed COVID-19 cases connected to schools have already been reported, according to the newspaper.

Williamson County Schools, Coffee County Schools and Blount County Schools, already have closed schools or altered schedules.

In Putnam County, more than 80 students and staff were quarantined after a student at Cookeville High School tested positive for COVID-19.

Alabama cases rising

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Several Alabama counties saw a large increase in coronavirus cases earlier this week because of backlogged data, officials said.

The high one or two-day increases seen in some counties were due to new testing facilities not reporting information regularly to the Alabama Department of Public Health, AL.com reported, citing the agency. Commercial and clinical labs are required to report positive and negative cases, the agency noted.

The department said it has “longterm reporting relationships” with many labs outside of its own Bureau of Clinical Laboratories, but said that isn’t always the case with new testing facilities that have sprouted up quickly to combat the pandemic.

The agency said it wasn’t aware of some of the new labs and those labs weren’t familiar with “mandatory reporting of notifiable diseases.” Health officials said they’re working on the problem.

Alabama had almost 105,000 confirmed cases of the coronavirus as of Thursday, according to researchers from Johns Hopkins.

Georgia fairs canceled

PERRY, Ga. — Two large fall fairs in Georgia have been canceled because of fears about COVID-19 transmission.

On Wednesday, organizers canceled the 2020 Georgia National Fair in Perry, a day after organizers canceled the North Georgia State Fair in Marietta.

Both events typically attract hundreds of thousands of people.

Georgia National Fair organizers said they still intend to host youth livestock shows, but that only the child showing the animal and their immediate families will be able to attend.

Fair CEO Stephen Shimp said that among other obstacles, many workers were declining to sign up this year, citing health concerns. Board member said they determined it would be impossible to host a fair that meets health guidelines.

“We feel that there is no ‘half-way’ to producing a fair like what we are used to hosting, and because of that we have reached this unforeseen decision to cancel,” Foster Rhodes, chairman of the state agency that puts on the fair, said in a statement.

The Cobb County Fair Association said the park that hosts the fair is instead being used for COVID-19 testing. They say they hope to create drive-through food weekends in late September and early October.

“We realized there were no options left available to us,” association President Frank Wigington said in a statement. Organizers said it was the first time since World War II that the event was canceled.