Virus deaths near 2K; hospital cases dip
The coronavirus death toll in Bexar County neared 2,000 Tuesday as the number of COVID-19 patients in area hospitals fell to the lowest point in three weeks, officials said Tuesday.
City and county officials confirmed 18 more people have died of COVID-19, bringing the official death toll since the pandemic began last March to 1,998.
“Far too many of our loved ones have been affected and we’ve lost many of our neighbors throughout this crisis,” Mayor Ron Nirenberg said at the daily city-county coronavirus briefing.
“So please keep their survivors, their friends and families and neighbors in your prayers.”
Most of those who died were in their 80s and 90s, although there was a Hispanic woman in her 60s and two white women in their 70s.
Fifteen were nursing home residents — a grim reminder of how swiftly the virus can spread among older people who live in communal settings.
“Once you get COVID inside a nursing home, it is so easily transmitted throughout the whole facility,” said Dr. Junda Woo, Metro Health’s medical director. “That’s why the government wanted to emphasize vaccinating those groups first.”
San Antonio added 821 new cases of the virus Tuesday. The total case count since March now stands at 162,929.
The seven-day average for new cases fell to 1,497 Tuesday from 1,722 the previous day.
The number of those hospitalized with the virus continued their decline from an all-time high of 1,520 last week. As of Tuesday, area hospitals held 1,353 COVID-19 patients — down from 1,402 Monday.
Hospitals admitted 156 new patients within the last 24 hours, officials said.
Those receiving intensive care for the virus dipped slightly to 404 from 409 yesterday. But those hooked up to ventilators to help them breathe grew from 263 Monday to 271 Tuesday.
“We’re starting to move in the right direction, which is a very good thing,” Nirenberg said, regarding the hospitalization numbers. “But that is because of the great work that you’re doing to protect yourself your family and your neighbors.”
Officials also cautioned that it
will take a while for hospital beds to empty. It took more than a month for hospitalizations to halve after they peaked at 1,267 during the summer spike, Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff said.
“To bring it down, everybody’s going to have to be very, very careful and to make sure we don’t let this COVID spread,” Wolff said.
Metro Health officials aren’t recommending that parents allow their kids to go back to the classroom — despite advice from the CDC released Tuesday that in-person learning could resume with masking and social distancing in place as well as some curtailing of other school activities such as indoor sports.
Officials greeted the Biden administration’s plan to purchase 200 million more doses of the COVID-19 vaccine with some optimism — though it’s not yet clear when the city and county would see shipments of those doses. Nirenberg spoke with White House officials Tuesday, who he said were “very focused on increasing production” of the vaccine.
“They’re doing everything they can, I believe, to put more vaccine out into the communities,” Nirenberg said.
Metro Health doesn’t have immediate plans to follow Harris and Comal counties, which have each established waiting lists for those seeking the vaccines. Residents in San Antonio have complained about the lack of such lists here as they encounter clogged phone lines and crashing websites as they try to schedule appointments.
Metro Health officials who had previously rejected the idea, seem more open to it now.
“Right now, it’s not on the front burner,” Woo said. “We haven’t ruled it out entirely. But there’s still a lot of challenges to making it work.” on waiting lists