Nicole Cobler @nicolecoblerJonathan Tilove @JTiloveTXPhilip Jankowski @PhilJankowski
As retail stores and restaurants prepare to reopen across the state on Friday, roughly two dozen counties have seen a spike in coronavirus cases in the last week, an American-Statesman analysis of state data shows.
Even as the numbers of daily new cases statewide have fallen from a peak on April 10, cases have doubled over the past week in seven counties with at least 10 coronavirus cases, and have increased by at least 50% in another 15 counties. Most are in rural areas with limited hospital capacity and in at least one locale — Amarillo — local officials are grappling with how to approach the reopening of the economy, ordered by Gov. Greg Abbott on Monday.
“Ever since the governor’s order came out yesterday, my phone’s been blowing up,” Amarillo Mayor Ginger Nelson said at a Zoom meeting of the City Council on Tuesday, with businesses wondering if the reopening is for real and her own trepidation that amid the city’s worrisome numbers, a reopening won’t last.
Amarillo straddles two counties: Potter and Randall. Those two counties and a third county to the north, Moore, have seen big increases in new cases in recent days. In Potter County, for example, the number of confirmed coronavirus cases jumped from 174 on April 22 to 396 on Tuesday.
On Monday, Abbott unveiled a plan to reopen retail, restaurants, malls and movie theaters with limited capacity statewide. He pointed to the state’s generally declining numbers of daily COVID-19 cases and laid out plans to increase testing and contact tracing to fully understand the spread of the disease.
But when comparing infection rates and the growth in cases over the last week, county-by-county comparisons paint a different picture.
Moore County has the highest rate of infection in the state, with 1,142 cases per 100,000 people, according to Tuesday figures from the Texas Department of State Health Services and analyzed by the Statesman.
In the last week, Moore County saw an 81% jump in COVID-19 cases from 162 on April 22 to 294 on Tuesday.
Moore, along with Lamar, Brown, Washington and Potter counties, made the New York Times national map of hot spots, which showed that the number of confirmed cases is doubling every seven days or less, far faster than the rest of Texas’ 254 counties.
According to the Department of State Health Services, there are 210 cases and one COVID-19 death associated with the JBS Beef plant in Moore County, though not all of those infected are county residents.
In Potter County, the rate of infection Tuesday was 319 cases per 100,000 people. The county reported 396 total cases Tuesday, a 127% increase from a week prior.
In the last seven days, the number of known COVID-19 cases in Lamar County, in northeast Texas, increased by 537%, jumping from eight cases on April 22 to 51 cases on Tuesday. Many of those new cases are associated with an outbreak at a Paris nursing home, according to local media reports.
Abbott nodded to the increase of cases in certain parts of the state Tuesday but said state and local officials could work together while still loosening restrictions statewide.
“We have seen outbreaks if you would, in some counties in the Panhandle, some counties in East Texas that have a very high growth rate,” Abbott said in an interview with KXAS in Dallas. “It’s easy to identify the high growth counties, and it’s easy to work with the local officials there to get it better under control.”
Downward trend
In announcing his plan to reopen the Texas economy, Abbott said it drew praise from Dr. Deborah Birx, response coordinator for the White House Coronavirus Task Force.
On the same day, the White House released a three-phased approach to help state and local officials reopen their economies. The report said each region or state should meet several sets of criteria before reopening, including a downward trajectory of documented cases within a 14-day period and a downward trajectory of positive tests as a percent of total tests within a 14-day period.
Texas has seen a downward trend in new cases, even if case numbers have fluctuated, over the last two weeks. Abbott noted in the Dallas interview Tuesday that the state’s percentage of positive tests declined from 10% to 9% over two weeks.
However, Texas saw its largest spike in coronavirus-related deaths on Wednesday, when the Department of State Health Services reported 42 new fatalities, bringing the statewide total to 732.
And the health agency reported 883 new cases Wednesday, a four-day high, bringing the total number of known coronavirus cases to 27,054.
Lauren Ancel Meyers, an epidemiologist and professor at the University of Texas, said even in counties that haven’t been identified as hot spots, loosened restrictions can lead to a high rate of COVID-19 spread.
And although the state’s most populous counties, including Travis County, have slowed their infection rates with the help of social distancing, the thousands of known COVID-19 cases can cause a spike, Meyers said.
“If there are a lot of current cases, those people are going to start spreading disease,” she said. “There is a very real chance that if individual communities relax too much that will end up fueling future waves of transmission, of hospitalizations and of deaths.”
It’s also not clear when Texas is expected to peak. Data from the Institute for Health, Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington found that the state’s daily death count is projected to peak in two days. The institute found that relaxing social distancing may be possible after June 15 with containment strategies that include testing, contact tracing, isolation and limiting gathering sizes.
In an interview with KVUE, Abbott called the model “ineffective and way wrong all along,” adding that state health doctors found that the state reached its peak on April 10 followed by a “steady decline.”
Abbott noted that case numbers will increase as the state reopens but said that’s expected as testing increases. In his news conference Monday, Abbott said Texas is on track to have up to 30,000 tests per day, a number that experts say is still too low to fully understand the spread of the disease.
He’s also made moves to improve contact tracing in the state, announcing plans to build a team of 4,000 contact tracers in May.
Amarillo concerns
“They stated fairly eloquently that they were going to be supplying contact tracers, and I would think that we ought to be on the top of the list,” said Dr. Scott Milton, an infectious disease specialist at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, who is advising Amarillo officials and participated in Tuesday’s council meeting.
Council Member Elaine Hays recalled the governor talking about deploying a thousand National Guard troops to help with testing.
“Hello,” Hays said, as if to ask when the help would arrive.
Earlier in the meeting, City Manager Jared Miller laid out the details of what was in the governor’s new orders, including a provision that has been little reported about.
“Now, this is one area that is unique, the governor has retained the authority to identify specific counties where reopen services would be prohibited. In other words they would default back to essential services only,” Miller said.
“But the governor and the governor only can make that decision,” Miller said. “No one else can make that decision. No county judge, no mayor, no anybody else can revert back to essential services only except for the governor. So the things that are in this order, barring any action from the governor are going to take place, starting May 1.”
Not long after, the mayor briefly left the meeting to take a call with Abbott chief of staff Luis Saenz, Mike Toomey, chief operating officer of the governor’s Strike Force to Open Texas, and a couple of the governor’s medical advisers.
“I’ll give you guys a report on what the governor’s office said,” said Nelson, the Amarillo mayor. “So clearly this is still in the governor’s hands. We established that. And he’s not backing up for us with regard to opening all of Texas on Friday.”
But she said, “what we have going on though is an open dialogue with his office. I think the door is wide open with the governor’s office and they said whatever help you need to work on those hot spots, we want to help you work on them.”
But, she said, ultimately, Amarillo’s fate rests with Amarillo residents.
“What we need is a lot of wise leaders in our city,” Nelson said. She said the behavior of business and church leaders in the current crisis has filled her with confidence. “But please don’t prove us wrong.”
