As our region begins to reopen during the COVID-19 pandemic, we encourage businesses and community members to continue to follow governmental requirements and CDC guidelines to keep their employees and our residents safe from exposure to the virus. 
 
Our leaders and medical staffs continue to monitor the situation and partner with local government and public health offices in the effort to slow the transmission of the virus. 
 
While our emergency departments, primary and specialty care, urgent care, and emergency surgery services remain in operation, you will begin to see other services, such as elective procedures, gradually return over the next couple of weeks. Rest assured, we are still taking every precaution to reduce transmission of the virus within our hospitals and offices to mitigate the spread of the virus through the communities we serve. 
 
Our facilities remain safe as our employees are also following the CDC guidelines for healthcare workers and patients. You may notice certain restrictions, such as screening at entrances, limited visitation policies, and the use of personal protective equipment, are still in place at our facilities and offices. 
 
We encourage individuals to seek medical care in the event there is a medical emergency or if medical treatment is needed. We also have alternative options like telehealth for qualified appointments. Please don’t hesitate to contact our facilities if you have any questions about your appointments or medical care. 
 
Our advice to the community remains the same during the pandemic. Those who exhibit mild symptoms of COVID-19 should self-quarantine at home and maintain distance from family members who are not experiencing symptoms. Continue these precautions until 72 hours after symptoms have resolved (typically 10-14 days). If you have a fever of 100.4 or above OR respiratory symptoms, call your healthcare provider. If you do not have a healthcare provider, call the closest urgent care center. Please call ahead to the facility so care teams can ensure the safety of their providers, other patients, and you. If you have a medical emergency and need to call 911, notify the dispatcher that you have a respiratory illness. If possible, put on a face mask before help arrives.
 
We want to extend our sincerest appreciation to our staffs who continue to provide medical care to our patients, as well as to first responders and law enforcement serving on the frontlines, and area residents doing their part to prevent the spread of the virus. We also want to thank the hundreds of businesses, organizations, groups and individuals who donated supplies, meals, time, and monetary contributions to support our operations and healthcare heroes. We are extremely grateful for these many gifts and could not do the work we are doing now without the generous assistance of our community.

For the latest information about our policies and scheduling information for surgeries or procedures, visit the sites below:

• www.chattmd.org
• www.erlanger.org/coronavirus
• www.memorial.org/coronavirus
• www.parkridgehealth.com/covid-19 

For information about COVID-19 testing in your region, please call these numbers:

• Alabama Public Health – 888-264-2256
• Georgia Department of Public Health – 844-442-2681
• Hamilton County Health Department – 423-209-8383
• North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services – 866-462-3821
• Tennessee Department of Health – 877-857-2945

His family has lived on Signal Mountain for five generations and he bought his dry-cleaning business from his parents. To say that Rob Whitmire was born into this locally owned business is an understatement.

“That’s me playing baseball as a White Star baseball player,” said Rob. “My parents started the business in 1960. I got into the business because I grew up in it and saw the advantages it would offer for family life.” Sixty years later, he and his wife of 28 years, Lois, have nurtured their business into a nationally award-winning company.

The Award of Excellence is the premier recognition program for professional members of the Drycleaning and Laundry Institute. To achieve the award, White Star Dry Cleaners must prove it meets rigorous, objective standards in cleaning and service. Most importantly, the company must clean and return a specialized Cleaning Performance Evaluation to prove their cleaning quality is among the best. In addition, the company must successfully remove six common, but difficult, stains on a silk swatch and return it for evaluation.

Four times - that’s how many times White Star has entered and won. “The stain swatch is very difficult; they do tell you what the stains are and that helps. The contest has helped us become a better dry cleaner,” Rob said.

The Whitmires purchased White Star from Rob’s his parents, Joann and Ralph, in 2015. Rob is proud to tout the modifications and modernization White Star has undertaken. “We have gone to heat seal barcode production system to streamline production and auto bagging machine to speed up production. We have added 24-hour drop off at most locations, added 24-hour pickup at the Signal Mountain store, purchased new delivery vans and added free home and office pickup and delivery,” Rob said.

Rob and Lois raised their family on Signal, very close the Sequatchie County line. “We have three children, Hogan, Marie and Brooke. They all graduated from Signal Mountain High School, starting in 2011.The experience we have had at Signal Mountain High School was surreal. It was like living our old Red Bank High School days - I graduated in 1987. An incredible community-supported high school, success in academics, State Champion level sports programs,” Rob said.

Hogan graduated from Samford University and is now finishing up his third year of dental school. Marie also graduated from Samford and is working in marketing. Brooke, the youngest, is finishing up her third year at Samford and hopes to pursue a career in physical therapy or as a physician’s assistant.

Rob is grateful this business has afforded him and his family a wonderful quality of life. “It is a great family business, not requiring me to travel or sell a product, which I would not be good at, but instead provide a much-needed service where quality and service sells itself. I am much more of a worker and prefer the production side of things, while my wife Lois does an awesome job in the office and takes a lot of pressure off me there,” Rob said.

In these uncertain times, Rob and Lois have worked hard to keep the company running.

“COVID-19 has really changed our business. We have gone to drive-thru-only service at all locations and ask customers to take advantage of our 24-hour drop boxes. We are asking customers for credit card only transactions and not to sign receipts. We have segregated incoming orders completely from any area that has cleaned processed orders,” Rob said, adding that employees’ temperatures are checked before they are allowed to work and dirty garments are kept in quarantine until they can be processed by trained personnel in protective gear.
​
by Michelle Michaud ​

When the good news broke in mid-March, the effect on our collective mood was positively therapeutic - the beginning of a turn away from fear and toward resilience. We’d been gobsmacked by the reality of how unprepared our institutions were to handle the novel virus, COVID-19. Quarantine, the novel solution, was still being robustly resisted, and discouragement about the future was widespread. The biggest issue was determining how many people were positive for the disease; insufficient testing and delays in processing them were creating a bottleneck. Without this information, containing and treating the pandemic seemed insurmountable. Everyone felt helpless.

Throughout the country, most hospitals and local labs don’t have the equipment to carry out the testing, so all the specimens from our region were being shipped to a lab in North Carolina, necessitating packing, shipping, checking in, testing, then reversing the process to return. There was also a shortage of the necessary chemical reagents. The backlog was increasing daily.   

Scientists/teachers Dr. Elizabeth Forrester and Dr. Dawn Richards had been “following the story from its inception,” out of concern for their students at Baylor School, especially those who board, said Forrester. They and their colleague, Dr. Mary Loveless, teach advanced science courses, such as molecular method, biomedical research, and engineering design, at Baylor, and thanks to an endowment from the estate of Elizabeth Weeks, the school has an astoundingly well-equipped laboratory. (The credentials of these exceptional teachers are listed at the end of the article).

Forrester, recognizing they already had the equipment needed to test for the virus, called Richards, the chairperson of Baylor Research, and said simply, “We can do this.” Richards agreed. “We wanted to help,” Forrester said, and because they’re local, she knew it would really speed up the process. At the same time, their students were watching as they carried out practice testing. “Our students realize[d] we had the capabilities in the laboratory. They’re smart! We knew they’d figure it out,” said Richards.

Baylor had to become certified by CDC, sort out legal issues, and comply with federal and state regulations. Due to the crisis, some regulations had been relaxed or ceded to the states, which created more confusion. The school was equipped to process about 65 tests a day, but if they could obtain the resources to “scale up” (add more equipment) they could increase that number considerably. Countless conversations and piles of paperwork followed. There were “lots of obstacles, roadblocks, long days, and late nights to figure it out,” Richards recalled, and Forrester added, “When we hit one roadblock, we would just problem-solve around it.”  

They wanted to “have the largest impact on the entire community” if possible, said Richards, and Mary Catherine Robbins, director of Baylor’s Health Center, was instrumental in establishing a partnership with Hamilton County. That was their goal - they all wanted to do as much as they could to help. Forrester put it this way: “The question wasn’t, ‘How can we do this?’ It was, ‘How can we NOT do this.’” 

Baylor possesses very sophisticated equipment (a nucleic acid extractor, an RNA transcriber, a biological safety cabinet, laminar flow hoods) that is used to process test specimens. They carry out an assay - an analysis to determine if a specific substance is present. For COVID-19, the first step is to extract the RNA from the specimen. Using a specific protocol, reagents (chemical compounds) are used to transcribe the RNA into DNA, which allows detection of coronaviruses. Specimens are picked up by a medical courier from doctors’ offices and hospitals, then delivered to Baylor. “Processing is less than four hours,” said Forrester, so the results can be returned the same day.

To accomplish this, a zealous team supported the women.  “So many people around us have said ‘how can I help?’ and got right to work,” said Richards. One of them is Dr. Loveless, a PhD in biomedical engineering. “I am supporting Dawn and Elizabeth in their efforts by continuing manufacturing effort,” Loveless said. Because Baylor has a Form2 3D printer, she is “seeking approval to manufacture [an FDA-approved ND swab] to prevent a shortage in test kits.”  She is also discussing future projects with her students for model design for swab sample capture, material selection for personal protection equipment (PPE), and processes for medical devices.

Like all teachers, these three continue during this crisis to work with students via technology, so this work is in addition to their regular duties. They are all wives and mothers, as well. “Our families are really stepping up,” said Forrester. Richards’ daughters “have been doing the laundry for weeks. They know we are leaving the house each day because we’re trying to help.” Forrester lives on Lookout and has three sons who attend Baylor and St. Nicolas. Richards’ daughter also attends Baylor; her son is in third grade at Nolan Elementary on Signal. And Loveless has two children, ages 5 and 7.

Recently, Grace McKenney, a Baylor alum and current premed student at University of Pennsylvania, volunteered to serve as “director of operations, working with onsite Health Department volunteers to coordinate patient information and reporting,” said Richards, and Forrester added, “She has been a godsend.” As they waited for one last instrument, two other scientists, Dr. Clint Smith and Dr. Alyssa Summers, have also been there, helping them prepare to increase capacity for testing to 300-plus.

As the news spread of their efforts, people came forward to contribute in whatever way possible. “The whole community is supporting us, offering to bring lunch, make dinner for our families,” said Forrester. They’ve received scores of emails and even got a call from someone offering to donate his stimulus check.  “That almost brought us to tears,” she said.

Their initiative and willingness to serve was just what the doctor ordered: an injection of hope, that local testing would enable health professionals to deal with the virus more quickly, with a booster of pride, that our city has such capable and creative educators who will step up on our behalf. What role models they are, for their students and for all of us. Elizabeth Forrester summed it up perfectly: “We are all doing our part.”  So must we.

Dr. Dawn Richards has an M.S. in Oceanography: Biogeochemical cycling and a Ph.D. in Microbial Ecology. Her interests include microbial community composition in soil, water, and biological systems and antibiotic resistance in the environment.

Dr. Mary Loveless has a B.S. in Computer Science: Computer Engineering and M.S./Ph.D. degrees in Biomedical Engineering. Her interests include embedded systems, mathematical modeling, and imaging.

Dr. Elizabeth Forrester has a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and a Ph.D. in Cancer Biology from Vanderbilt University. Her interests include mammary tumorigenesis and metastasis, molecular genetics and epigenetics. 
​
by Carol Lannon