Bexar County tips 2,500 virus deaths
Bexar County’s death toll from COVID-19 crossed 2,500 Tuesday as hospitalizations from the virus decline and local officials try to get a grip on the status of the virus following last week’s winter calamity and ensuing power outages.
Nine more people have died of the virus within the past two weeks, officials reported Tuesday, bringing the San Antonio area’s confirmed death toll to 2,501.
The youngest person to die was a Hispanic man in his 40s. The oldest were two women in their 80s — one was Hispanic, the other white.
“A sad reminder that this deadly virus is still present in our community,” San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg said at the daily citycounty coronavirus briefing. “So please continue to take precautions and be partifuclarly cognizant of those most vulnerable among us. Please keep their friends and families and those who have lost loved ones in your prayers this evening.”
Another 270 new cases of the virus were reported Tuesday. The total number of confirmed cases
in Bexar County since the pandemic began now stands at 193,961.
But officials have warned for days that lower counts of new cases in recent days were likely skewed by the slowdown of testing last week as the region dealt with fallout from severe winter weather. It's also possible that the county could still see a bounce in cases resulting from household gatherings during Super Bowl weekend more than two weeks ago, Wolff said.
Power and water outages also forced the rescheduling of many vaccine appointments, but vaccinations and testing have started to pick back up. The vaccine site run by University Health at the Wonderland of the Americas mall administered about 3,500 vaccines Tuesday, Wolff said.
“That catches us up with everybody that either missed appointments or had one that had to be postponed,” Wolff said.
University Health expects to administer 9,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine at Wonderland over the next three days, he said.
The city's testing sites conducted 2,800 tests Monday, a steady increase from when those sites were reopened last week after the winter weather passed, said Assistant City Manager Colleen Bridger, who oversees the city's coronavirus response — “nowhere near the numbers that we were seeing in January.”
“Time will tell if this is an increase to the new normal or whether we will continue to have an increase in testing,” Bridger said.
The number of coronavirus patients in local hospitals continued to fall Tuesday and has more than halved since the beginning of the month. Hospitals were treating 569 COVID-19 patients — down significantly from 1,176 on Feb. 2. Within the last 24 hours, some 75 more patients were admitted.
Of those in the hospital, 208 patients were receiving intensive care and 126 were hooked up to ventilators to help them breathe.
Fourteen percent of all of the county hospital patients have COVID-19.
“We are continuing to move in the right direction,” Wolff said.