Positivity rate for virus up 1%
San Antonio’s coronavirus positivity rate has increased nearly 1 percentage point since last week, but officials reported no new deaths from COVID-19 on Monday.
The portion of tests yielding positive results rose to 5.8 percent Monday, up from 4.9 percent last week. Officials have been striving for months to reduce the local positivity rate to 5 percent or lower as they have worked to bring transmission of the virus to heel.
Local health officials also use that rate as a threshold for their recommendations for how schools should reopen safely. As a result, they reclassified the risk of spreading the virus while attending school from low to moderate and recommended that in-person instruction be prioritized only for students with disabilities or poor internet access.
“We take the good with the bad,” Mayor Ron Nirenberg said during the daily coronavirus briefing. “This tells us that the virus is still active in our community and is transmitting person to person,
and we've got to watch that very carefully.”
There were 46 new coronavirus infections reported, bringing the cumulative case count for Bexar County to 59,730. The seven-day average for daily new cases of the virus is 141.
Bexar County's death toll from the pandemic stands at 1,201, after health officials added 27 deaths of residents to the total Sunday from a reporting backlog.
COVID-related hospitalizations fell to 184, the lowest since mid-June, a total that includes 13 new admissions. Of those hospitalized, 78 patients were receiving intensive care and 40 were breathing with a ventilator.
The stress that the pandemic is placing on area hospitals is now considered “normal,” officials said. During the height of San Antonio's coronavirus surge over the summer, when more than 1,200 patients were hospitalized on any given day, they characterized the stress on hospitals as severe.
County Judge Nelson Wolff said COVID hospitalizations were the metric that he monitored most closely, adding that trends in that area have been “super positive.” Transfers of COVID patients from hospitals to long-term care facilities for further recovery also have dropped, he said.
Last week, the city began testing asymptomatic residents for the virus at its nocost testing sites through a partnership with Community Labs, a new nonprofit testing venture. Golareh Agha, chief of informatics for the Metropolitan Health District, said 155 people without symptoms were tested by appointment only during a limited launch of the expanded testing effort.
The opportunity for asymptomatic testing will expand this week, officials said Monday. Walk-up testing will be conducted from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. today through Friday at the Cuellar and Ramirez community centers.
“The more testing we do, the better in terms of understanding exactly what's happening in Bexar County,” Agha said at the briefing. “By expanding testing to asymptomatic individuals, we can also get a better handle of what the case rate is” in that group.
With early voting in the Nov. 3 election starting Tuesday, officials encouraged residents to cast their ballots at polling sites across the county, where protocols to protect against the pandemic are in place.
“The county has done a great job to make sure you can vote safely in any of the sites around town,” Nirenberg said. “Please go vote. It will be safe for you here in Bexar County to do so.”