Harris County stays on COVID ‘red’ alert
Even as state expands reopenings, Hidalgo is standing firm on warning to ‘stay home’
The counts of COVID-19 patients in local hospitals have been falling for two months. Restaurant patios are packed. Houston’s symphony and pro soccer teams are resuming at limited capacity. The state is relaxing restrictions on many businesses next week.
So, why is Harris County still at its highest threat level, urging residents to stay home?
Simple, County Judge Lina Hidalgo says: The metrics her office compiled in forming the threat level system in June have not all been met.
Hospitalization trends met the county’s goals weeks ago. A change to the way new cases were tallied cleared that hurdle on Monday, as did the last hospital target — COVID-19 patients making up less than 15 percent of intensive care beds. The lone barrier to downgrading from red (“stay home”) to orange (“minimize ALL contacts”) is now the county’s test positivity rate, which, at 7.7 percent, exceeds the 5 percent target.
Hidalgo said she understands the public is tired of vigilance, but she loses no sleep over being a holdout.
“What I’m trying to do is have at least one level of government that’s offering research and numbers-based information and con
sistently refuses to be swayed by political one-liners,” she said. “That continues to be my commitment. When you have folks pretending we can just go back to normal, it puts the community at risk and it gives people false hope.”
The first-term Democrat’s consistent support of restrictions aimed at containing the virus — and, more broadly, her willingness to sound the alarm about its threat — has helped make her a target of conservatives since the spring.
Her handling of a recent state backlog of COVID-19 cases fed that dynamic. Texas officials failed to keep up with a spike in cases earlier this summer, building up a data backlog that understated the spike on the way up and overstated it on the way down, as new cases in recent weeks have been reported alongside old cases finally making their way to local health departments.
Hidalgo’s office for weeks did not remove the backlogged cases from its metrics. Her office clarified the data last week, adding charts omitting old cases that showed the goal had been met weeks before.
“Could we have done a better job presenting the charts differently earlier? Yes, definitely we should have done that,” Hidalgo said. But, she added, “We knew about the backlog and we also knew that the case number wasn’t the only metric keeping us at red.”
Unattainable metric?
Still, Harris County retaining its highest alert setting puts it out of step with some of Texas’ other urban centers. Austin Public Health moved to the third of its five COVID-19 warning stages in late August, and Dallas County moved from red to orange on Sept. 2. San Antonio rates the virus threat level there as “safe.”
Gov. Greg Abbott preempted Hidalgo’s ability to issue enforceable edicts well before she announced the threat level system in June or moved the county to red late that month. Still, Hidalgo reiterated the metrics in August as guidance for school districts weighing a return to in-person instruction.
At the time, 10 local superintendents said the county’s metrics were unattainable, and many districts have resumed in-person classes in recent weeks. Humble ISD and Spring ISD even formed their own COVID-19 guidelines.
Humble ISD Trustee Lori Twomey, discussing the backlogged case counts at a recent board meeting, said she feared the county’s reports were intended to “knowingly propagate false data in an effort to manipulate and instill fear.”
Hidalgo dismissed the notion that she has any motivation to keep the county at its highest threat level, and said her staff is examining whether downgrading to “orange” could be justified even without the county meeting its test positivity target.
“We’re definitely looking at these very closely and looking at that holdout metric,” she said. “Do we have to wait for it to turn or is there research that shows it makes sense for us to go to orange already?”
Though Hidalgo said at Commissioners Court on Tuesday that she hoped improving trends meant the threat level change could happen in “a matter of days,” the county’s positivity rate has never dropped below 5 percent, let alone for 14 days. The city of Houston’s positivity rate is 6.1 percent; unlike the county, the city includes a small number of inconclusive tests in its calculation, slightly lowering its rate.
The city and county do not remove back-to-back confirmation tests by individual patients from their positivity calculations, and do not track the volume of such tests. The CDC had recommended COVID-19 patients recovering at home get two successive negative tests 24 hours apart before leaving isolation, but in July limited that recommendation to only a fraction of cases.
Big picture
Dr. James McDeavitt, senior vice president at Baylor College of Medicine, called the county’s 5 percent target reasonable and widely used, but said, broadly, COVID-19 indicators suggest this is an appropriate time to slowly reopen.
Setting goals and then ditching them when the public grows tired of the restrictions they support would be a mistake, McDeavitt said. When Abbott reopened the state in May, Texas had not hit the benchmarks his own advisers had set.
“On the other hand,” McDeavitt added, “if you set metrics and slavishly wait until every single one of those numbers is where it needs to be, that is also problematic. You need to look at the big picture — and I know from talking to the county that’s what they do.
Everybody is trying to find the right balance.”
State Sen. Paul Bettencourt, RHouston, said the county’s threat level system and its goal of guiding public behavior can be helpful. However, he said, retaining the “red” threat level when suburban schools are open and the state is relaxing restrictions risks having residents dismiss the warnings entirely.
“For a system like this, the public has to see and believe it’s recognizing what they’re feeling and seeing,” Bettencourt said. “The longer she stays at threat level red, she’s just lowering the credibility of the measurement. There’s only so many times Captain Kirk can say ‘red alert.’”
Meanwhile, more local school districts, including Houston, Alief and Sheldon ISDs, plan to bring students back into buildings in the next several weeks, with no guarantee the county will hit its targets for resuming face-to-face instruction.
Regardless, state rules require districts to offer in-person instruction to all families that want it by the ninth week of their school year. The ninth week arrives in early October for Alief and early November for Houston and Sheldon.
HISD, the state’s largest district, is scheduled to partially resume in-person instruction on Oct. 19, with the warning that the date could change based on COVID-19 conditions and recommendations from government officials.
HISD Interim Superintendent Grenita Lathan has voiced more support for county guidelines than many of her peers. When virtual-only classes resumed on Sept. 8, Lathan said the district would create a framework for evaluating when to restart in-person instruction, with city and county data taken into account. HISD leaders have not released details about that framework, but said in a statement Thursday that data on new cases, test positivity rates and hospitalization rates “are weighed equally.”
The guidelines, Lathan said last week, “will closely mirror what we’ve received from the county judge’s office.”