Virus numbers continue slow fall
Is it possible that San Antonio escaped the expected surge in COVID-19 cases following thousands of Super Bowl watch parties on Feb. 7?
It’s probably still too early to say, officials said Friday evening, because virtually no coronavirus testing occurred during Feb. 14 to 19, the week of ice, snow, single-digit temperatures, power outages and frozen pipes.
“It looks like we may have dodged a bullet,” said Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff.
A “downward trend” of cases that held steady through late February would seem to indicate that community awareness and mask vigilance kept the city from letting its guard down during the big game, suggested Mayor Ron Nirenberg.
Most Super Bowl-related cases should have emerged by Feb. 21, with the majority
showing up within one week, said epidemiologist Cherise Rohr-allegrini, CEO of the San Antonio AIDS Foundation.
“We may be out of the woods a week from today,” said Rohr-allegrini, about any freeze-related surge. “But only if we’re testing at a good level. We’ve been testing at about 65,000 to 80,000 a week, and that’s good.”
“My concern is that we just don’t have enough testing data on potential exposures from Super Bowl Sunday,” said Rohr-allegrini.
And there’s certainly not enough data yet to judge whether the freeze week and its multi-family crowding into the warmest living room available also created a virus surge.
Wolff said he and Nirenberg had sent a letter this week to Gov. Greg Abbott asking him to not suspend his order that Texans wear masks in public, a move the governor has hinted is coming soon.
Wolff said when Abbott stopped the county’s mask mandate last May it spawned “an explosion of cases through the summer.” He said he hopes Abbott will wait at least until this summer before relaxing any statewide COVID-19 guidelines.
The coronavirus pandemic continues to show a gradual and encouraging decline in San Antonio, with 501 new cases reported Friday. Hospitalizations are also trending downward, officials said.
The city’s daily briefing noted six deaths within the past 14 days.
Metropolitan Health District
officials said they could not provide a sevenday average on the new case count because there have not been seven “normal” days of testing for the virus since the icy week of freezing temperatures and power outages.
They said 47 new admissions have brought the total number of patients in San Antonio hospitals to 461, with 180 in intensive care units and 100 on ventilators to assist their breathing.
The newly-reported deaths included a white woman in her 80s, a Black man in his 60s and a white man in his 20s, all at Methodist Hospital. A Hispanic woman in her 50s died at University Hospital, and a Hispanic woman in her 60s and a white man in his 50s died at Methodist Texsan Hospital.
As the United States surpasses half a million COVID-19 deaths and a third vaccine could start reaching states next week, lawmakers heard testimony on how the vaccine rollout has faltered.
One of the biggest problems, according to expert witnesses, is the stark inequity in where the shots are being distributed, often overlooking communities of color.
“In my part of Texas, we are still not where we need to be,” U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett said Friday in his opening remarks as chairman of the Ways and Means Health Subcommittee. “We know that more deaths and illnesses are on the way until we get more vaccinated.”
The subcommittee held a three-hour hearing on the vaccine rollout that was streamed live on Youtube.
Doggett, a Democrat who represents part of Bexar County, noted that not all front-line health care workers have had access to the
COVID-19 vaccine, people are waiting for hours on the phone trying to secure an appointment and state-designated mass vaccination sites called “hubs” are in wealthier areas.
“The rollout has been disappointingly slow and states were largely unprepared with no concrete plans for implementation,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, a physician and dean of Brown University School of Public Health in Providence, R.I. “The distribution has hardly been even, and half of the states are not reporting who is getting vaccines and who is not. We must do better at collecting and publicizing this data.”
Jha said poor health data makes it hard to see whether efforts to each Black and Latino communities are working.
Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of American Public Health Association, said that based on the limited data that was available on vaccinations, “we’re still seeing troubling trends and disparities.”
Benjamin said aside from there being hesitancy to get vaccinated in some communities of color, there are many barriers to access, including not having a computer, Wi-fi and broadband internet.
Many states do not have a single point of entry, he said, which can be frustrating for people having to check multiple places in the quest to get vaccinated.
“We just don’t have enough telephone-based appointment systems,” he said. In addition, “we need to make sure these appointments are available in the evenings and weekends, especially for our essential workers.”
Dr. Kimberly Avila Edwards, an Austin pediatrician and director of advocacy at Ascension Seton, said a “national blueprint” is needed for vaccination efforts.
Dr. Reshma Ramachandran, national clinicians scholar at Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Conn., said another issue is the lack of transparency and accountability from vaccine manufacturers who received billions of dollars in taxpayer funds for COVID-19 research and vaccine development.
The physician testified that while upfront spending was necessary, no comprehensive database of expenditures exists.
“It’s unclear who owns this publicly funded technology,” she said. “These manufacturers and the U.S. government have left the American public in the dark on how their taxpayer dollars are being spent and whether access to these vaccines will be guaranteed.”
She expressed support for the Taxpayer Research and Coronavirus Knowledge Act or TRACK Act introduced by Doggett this congressional session. If passed, the bill would create a user-friendly database to monitor federal funds spent on vaccines.