MOULTRIE, Ga. — The State of Georgia will be taking further steps to protect first responders from COVID-19 as soon as today, Colquitt 911 Director Theresa Warburg said on Thursday.

Announced in a statement released on Tuesday, April 14, the Georgia Emergency Management and Homeland Security Agency alongside the Georgia Department of Public Health will start providing a list of positive COVID-19 cases to 911 centers.

This list will be updated daily by the DPH as hospitals, acute care facilities and labs report confirmed cases to them. 

It’ll include names and addresses of those cases, but to ensure patient confidentiality names will not be given to 911 centers.

“Once their quarantine time is up — the positive cases [I mean] — the names will go away from the list,” Warburg said. 

A positive case’s duration on the list is a 21-day period. If there’s someone on the list who’s waiting for test results and the results come back negative, they are removed immediately, she said.

Once the Colquitt 911 Center receives the list and puts it into its system, law enforcement, firefighters and EMTs will be flagged with a code showing if the address they’re dispatched to has had a confirmed case within the past 21 days.

Colquitt 911 had already been screening calls and notifying first responders, so this will be an upgrade to the current formula.

“Right now, we’re speculating and law enforcement and especially EMS personnel are going in with personal protective gear on,” she said. “This way they will know that it is a confirmed case or a possible pending confirmed case and they can better prepare for themselves.”

The GEMA statement urged 911 centers to continue asking COVID-19 screening questions, however.