Texas could fly blind if it prepares to reopen in schools because there has been a huge drop in COVID-19 tests, even as the number of confirmed cases has climbed above 500,000 and the death toll from the virus in 10,000 closes.
Even more worrying is the positivity rate of the tests that have been reported recently in Texas, suggesting that there may be many more cases that have not been discovered there.
“Yes, any school district that does not test its own students flies blind,” said Vivian Ho, a health economist at Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine. “But public schools do not have the resources to do that kind of testing under the current circumstances.”
While some smaller companies are hard at work developing $ 5 tests to diagnose COVID-19, at present most school systems are “stuck with $ 100 PCR tests and can not afford to pass them on” every student, “said Ho.
How would Ho solve the test problem? “You could maybe throw a billion dollars at this problem, but that would be too good of an idea,” she said.
Last weekend, the Houston Astros baseball team and the Texas Department of Emergency Management opened a COVID-19 test center near Minute Maid Park that administers thousands of tests a day.
“That we had a gigantic uptick in testing, 30,000 or more,” Ho said.
But that is not nearly enough in a city of 2.4 million that has already reported more than 50,000 cases, she said.
As a silver lining, major Texas cities like Austin have reported a drop in demand for COVID-19 testing, which is opening the door for people who have no symptoms to test. Local health officials continued to offer tests to asymptomatic people in late June when Austin and the rest of Texas experienced a dramatic spike in new cases threatening to overwhelm the hospital system.
“We are realizing from other jurisdictions that they are also seeing a decline in the number of people trying tests,” Austin-Travis County Health Authority Dr. Mark Escott told the local newspaper.
Why are people not tested? Escott said that frustration over latency figures in that comparison and it is not just a Texas issue.
“We are now seeing what is being seen in many parts of the country at the moment and that is a significant decrease in the tests that are being done,” Escott said. “This is not because tests are not available, it’s because fewer people are signing up for tests.”
Texas administered an average of 36,255 coronavirus tests per day during the week ending Aug. 8, The Texas Tribune reported. That was a drop of about 42 percent from two weeks before, when the average number of daily tests was 62,516.
At the same time, there was a 20 percent jump in positive testing in the week ending August 8th. That was an increase of six percent in the previous two weeks, when the positivity rate was around 14 percent.
And on Saturday, more than half of the 14,000 COVID-19 tests were positive – a new state record.
The Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a staunch ally of President Donald Trump, has been accused of sending conflicting messages to local school superintendents about returning students to classrooms.
On the one hand, Abbott said he trusts her to decide when and how students should return to class. But Abbott has also “moved to block local health authorities from closing the classroom before the school year begins,” The Texas Tribune reported.
“Districts, I think, are very concerned about creating these rolling situations where people come back to campus and then get sick and then everyone has to leave again,” said Joy Baskin, director of legal services for the Texas Association or School Boards, in a recent podcast.
As to why Texas is seeing an increase in new cases, Abbott said on Tuesday that it is because some Texans feel they can leave their guard “as if they were just with family members.”
“And that turns out to be not the case,” he said.
Nearly 5.2 million cases of Covid-19 have been reported in the US since Wednesday afternoon along with 165,680 deaths, according to the latest numbers from NBC News. The U.S. has claimed more than 20 million cases and nearly 745,000 deaths in about a quarter of the world.
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Singer Trini Lopez, who scored hits in the 1960s with his versions of songs such as “Lemon Tree” and “If I Had a Hammer,” died Tuesday of complications related to the coronavirus. He was 83 and had been fighting to survive for six weeks, said his songwriter partner Joe Chavira. Their latest song, “If By Now”, was performed for a coronavirus fundraiser that was expected on local television over the weekend in Chavira’s hometown of Santa Barbara, he said. “He went on to try to tell people about COVID,” Chavira said.
- A Florida sheriff has prevented his deputies from wearing masks in most work situations. Marion County Sheriff Billy Woods insists there is no definitive evidence that wearing masks limits the spread of the virus, even though the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, along with most of the medical institution, have said the opposite. Even Trump has started wearing a mask at public appearances. But Woods, who is not a doctor, was adamant. “This is no longer a debate, nor is it up for discussion,” he wrote in a memo published Tuesday, the same day that Florida reported 277 more coronavirus deaths.
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A New Jersey homeowner and an event promoter were busted after they all hosted a house party on Sunday where the 250 as-if guests charged $ 35 admission. It was the third major paid-admission bash that shut down police in New Jersey last week. The owner, Jeffrey Davis Jr., and the promoter, Marheem Miller, were accused of violating the state’s order against large social gatherings and local ordinances. Earlier this month, Gov. Phil Murphy, whose state could flatten the coronavirus curve but has seen an uptick in new cases of late, tight restrictions on the number of people who can gather at indoor venues or parties from 100 to 25.
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New Jersey is not the only state where people endanger the public by hosting large parties. In Nashville, two men were arrested for throwing an August 1 party to promote an outfit called The Fashion House that attracted hundreds of people who participated in photo shoots and tattoos. Christopher Eubank and Jeffrey Mathews were accused of violating health orders by hosting a meeting of more than 25 people, not requiring social distance and not requiring face covering. Nashville Mayor John Cooper called the party “irresponsible” and local code enforcers struck a “Stop Use Order” on the property for “illegally operating a commercial business in a residential area.”
- Man’s best friend is apparently not immune to COVID-19. A dog in North Carolina who died after suffering from an ‘acute illness’ earlier this month has tested positive for coronavirus. It is not yet clear what exactly killed the dog. Only a handful of animals in the United States have contracted the disease, according to the Department of Agriculture. Most of these infections occurred after the animal had contact with people who had COVID-19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. What should a dog owner do to prevent COVID-19 from being passed on to a pet? Avoid “cuddling, cuddling, cuddling or licking or sharing food.”
Joe Murphy contributed.
