CORONAVIRUS
After ice storm, officials brace for potential spike in cases.
On paper, the storm that walloped Texas last week coincided with one of the state’s best weeks for COVID-19, with reported cases plummeting in nearly every county.
A week later, public health officials are bracing for a potential new wave of reported infections.
“The next couple of weeks are going to be really important to watch,” said Wesley Long, an infectious disease expert at Houston Methodist Hospital.
The storm left more than 4 million Texans without power for the better part of a week and brought vaccinations and COVID tests to a halt as hospitals dealt with water shortages and an influx of patients, including hundreds who were diagnosed with carbon monoxide poisoning.
Many Texans were forced to abandon social distancing and other precautions as they sought refuge outside their homes for days at a time.
“That’s potentially concerning,” Long said, adding that the widespread need for plumbers or home repairs may further muddy the state’s outlook as many continue to recover from the storm.
But there may have been a benefit, too: With grocery stores, restaurants and other public places shuttered throughout the week, the risk of interactions and exposure dipped.
“A lot of people were in a real state of quarantine all week,” said Stephen Williams, director of the Houston Health Department. “Theoretically, it could be a tradeoff, but I don’t know that we know that yet.”
With counties closing facilities amid the freezing temperatures last week, screening for COVID-19 plummeted across Texas. The state reported no new tests for four days.
The seven-day average of new PCR tests administered dropped by roughly 40 percent during the week of the freeze, according to data from the Texas Department of State Health Services. As a result, there have been far fewer new test results, and therefore fewer new cases reported.
During the week of the storm, Texas reported more than 14,000 new cases and 411 deaths from COVID, according to a Chronicle analysis of state and local health data. These totals were much lower than normal, being more in line with one or two days’ worth of reports.
Roughly a third of all Texas counties — including Bexar and Travis counties, home to some of the state’s most populous cities — did not report a single new case of COVID from Feb. 15 to Feb. 19, according to DSHS data.
Even in counties that did post updates, numbers were down. Harris County reported the highest total for the week, with more than 2,200 cases, according to the data, comparable to a single day’s update from earlier in February.
This trend of lower-than-normal case increases has continued even after the storm ended, with daily totals lower than those recorded at the beginning of February. Given the lack of testing during the storm, this is not surprising because it takes a few days for PCR tests to give results. With the averages for new tests and results not yet returning to their prestorm levels, and the delay between when someone takes a test and when they receive their result, it could be days before there’s a clearer picture of how rates are truly trending.
While there’s been a drastic drop in tests and cases, the state’s positive test rate has ticked up, recently surpassing 13 percent, a level last seen at the beginning of February.
Given the unsteadiness in the state’s data, the COVID Tracking Project recommended using hospitalizations as the most reliable metric to gauge the state of the pandemic in Texas. And therein lies some good news.
Hospitalizations for the virus have continued their steady decline, with fewer than 7,000 patients across the state. This is down from the 11,000 Texans hospitalized at the beginning of the month and the lowest it’s been since Nov. 9.
On Wednesday, more than 5,500 people received their first dose of the Pfizer vaccine through a new supersite at NRG Park, with an additional 120,000 expected to be inoculated over the next two months.
Experts are also optimistic for a forthcoming, one-shot vaccine from Johnson & Johnson, which does not require the level of cold storage needed for other vaccines on the market. That was a serious problem last week, as the ice storm collapsed the state’s power grid and forced public health agencies in Harris County and other large metropolitan areas to quickly offload their vaccine stock.
More than one week later, many counties are still dealing with limited vaccine supplies, a troubling sign for Texas, which has routinely ranked among the worst of any states for vaccinations per capita.
Regardless of which way numbers trend in the coming weeks, Long said it’s crucial that people continue to remain vigilant. “We can’t let our guard down,” he said.