New COVID-19 cases in Alabama continue to fall this week, with a seven-day average on Thursday the lowest the state has seen in nearly three months.
The Alabama Department of Public Health reported a seven-day average of new cases around 1,471, a return to case levels seen prior to a sustained and concerning holiday-related spike that threatened to overwhelm Alabama s hospitals.
Hospitalizations are also in a steady decline from the holiday period, though patient loads remain high with a seven-day average of 1,847 confirmed hospitalizations on Thursday.
Montgomery County hospitals reported 131 in-patient cases on Thursday, with an additional 20 patients in Baptist Health s Prattville location. In Tuscaloosa, the DCH system reported 94 in-patient cases.
Alabama on Feb. 8 will expand eligibility for COVID-19 vaccinations to include people 65 or older, in addition to an additional subset of frontline workers.
But public officials on Friday reiterated there is not enough vaccine doses to go around and asked healthier people who may be eligible to consider delay seeking a vaccination.
More than 1 million Alabamians will soon be eligible to receive the vaccine, though the state only receives a fraction of that number of doses per week.
Alabama had previously resisted expanding beyond the 75 or older and first responders category, given that the available vaccine doses wouldn t even fully cover that group. State Health Officer Dr. Scott Harris suggested Friday that surrounding states, which have opened up to larger age groups, were causing frustration and confusion in Alabama.
Men incarcerated at Alabama s Kilby prison are staging a hunger strike in protest of unconstitutional conditions and treatment inside Alabama s correctional system.
At least nine prisoners at Kilby began refusing food on Jan. 1, subsisting on water inside single monitoring cells in the prison. The hunger strike coincides with a wider economic boycott and labor strike in prison industries as the Free Alabama Movement, an inmates rights group, says prisoners are experiencing a full-fledged humanitarian crisis inside Alabama prison walls.
Over the past two weeks, advocates and prisoners say strikers have been moved within the prison like a shell game, making it difficult for external advocates to determine their welfare. Prison officials said Friday just one prisoner was still being monitored for a hunger strike.