City adding 24 test sites, 300 tracers to virus plan
Houston’s at-risk areas prioritized in new strategy
Houston health officials, anticipating coronavirus cases will escalate as businesses reopen, announced plans Thursday to ramp up testing and contact tracing by the end of the month, marking the most aggressive scale-up yet of the city’s efforts to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.
Under the plan, announced by Houston COVID-19 Recovery Czar Marvin Odum, the city will operate a total of 24 testing sites by the end of May and hire 300 new contact tracers to track the recent activity of people who test positive for the new coronavirus. The sites will offer free testing and residents will not be required to present symptoms of COVID-19.
The Houston Health Department already has deployed 125 of what Odum referred to as “public health disease detectives,” 70 of whom are health department employees who were diverted from their typical job responsibilities. The city has 11 existing coronavirus testing sites and has tested an estimated 36,000 people, according to Houston Health Authority David Persse.
When new testing sites are opened, city officials will prioritize the “most vulnerable and at-risk neighborhoods first,” Odum said. Health data revealed that COVID-19 has an acute impact on African Americans due in part to their high rate of chronic illnesses known to worsen the impact of the disease.
“These are neighborhoods where people are more likely to die if they get COVID-19 and, in many cases until now, have had relatively limited access to testing,” Odum said. “We are changing that.”
‘Immense operation’
Using federal funds from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act passed in March, the city will add a combination of new fixed sites, mobile units and “strategic outreach teams,” officials said Thursday.
Health officials will decide where to place the sites based on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, UTHealth and the city health department, Odum said. The city is operating the sites in a partnership with the Texas Division of Emergency Management, United Memorial Medical Center, Kroger and others.
The contact tracers will be tasked with interviewing coronavirus patients to determine who they came in contact with after becoming infectious. City officials then will seek to test those people for COVID-19 and tell them what to do “to protect themselves, their family and their community,” Odum said.
“This is an immense, immense operation, and quite frankly, I will tell you it will consume a huge percentage of the COVID dollars that we have received from the federal government,” said Mayor Sylvester Turner, referring to the $404 million sent to the city to combat COVID-19.
Earlier this week, the city opened a new mobile testing site at Daniel Ortiz Middle School and extended operations at an existing location in Sunnyside. Both have a daily capacity of 150 tests and are scheduled to remain open through Saturday. Officials also relocated a mobile unit from the Kashmere Multi-Service Center to the Hirame Clarke Multi-Service Center.
City officials on Thursday recorded 88 new cases of COVID-19, for a total of 4,227 cases to date. Turner also announced three new deaths from the disease, bringing the city’s total to 85. There have been 7,377 confirmed cases across all of Harris County and 154 deaths.
Combined efforts
Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo last week announced plans to recruit 300 more contact tracers, separate from the 300 announced by the city Thursday and the 4,000 contact tracers that Gov. Greg Abbott said the state would mobilize by the end of May.
The number of daily cases in Houston generally has declined or remained flat since the start of May, though with a major caveat: Rice University researchers found that just one in 10 Houstonians with possible COVID-19 symptoms are getting tested.
Meanwhile, barber shops and beauty salons are set to partially reopen Friday after Abbott announced he would further ease statewide restrictions imposed to blunt the spread of the coronavirus. Gyms and non-essential manufacturing businesses are allowed to partially reopen May 18, the governor said, while restaurants, movie theaters and malls were allowed to resume business with limited capacity last Friday.