(Seguin) – Guadalupe County appears to be on the cusp of where it needs to be in order to do away with the wearing of masks. That reality is being closely watched by the Guadalupe County Commissioners Court and the Guadalupe County Emergency Management Office who from day one has been working to report the number of positive COVID-19 cases to the public.
In July, Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued an executive order requiring all Texans to wear a face covering over their nose and mouth in public spaces in counties with 20 or more positive COVID-19 cases.
During his regular update to the court on the COVID-19 pandemic here in Guadalupe County, Patrick Pinder, emergency management coordinator, spoke more of that mandate and where the county was currently positioned in possibly having that order lifted.
“One thing that we started talking about last week is there’s always the option for the judge to look at the under the 20 mask requirement. We got pretty close last week at 21 but I spoke with the judge last week on that. Before we take any action or steps to place an order in the county that we fall under the 20, we need to have a consistent under 20 count. I think the judge agrees with me on that. So, even if this number falls below 20 today, we can’t just sign the orders and send it to the governor and say Guadalupe County doesn’t want to wear masks. I think we need to have a consistent approach on that and make sure that we maintain an under 20 before the judge makes that decision or signs that order. I know some jurisdictions are wanting their county judges to do that. I think some counties south of us, there are petitions going for the county judge to sign the mask order, to exempt them from the under 20 cases. So, I just wanted to let the court know that that is an option if we do go below 20. Per the governor’s order, we can opt into that. However, at this point, we have to be consistent under 24. That has to be a reality here,” said Pinder.
Guadalupe County Judge Kyle Kutscher says after weeks of seeing a decline in the numbers and feeling a bit more optimistic, things have again changed adding to the overall stress that comes with reporting the number of cases and keeping the county even farther away from initiating any plan to put down the mask.
“Then, we get notification from the department of state health while Patrick and I are having these conversations that they’ve changed and have added these ‘to be determined numbers’ (TBD) and I’ll get to my frustration with that in just a second and then yesterday, I get a call from Patrick and he said he was contacted by the department of state health and says they were doing electronic clean-ups. They found a bunch of other cases that have probably already passed but they are going to be giving that additional information later and our total numbers could go up quite a bit. I think in the email it said ‘significantly.’ So, the frustration is we’ve been working off of this understanding that we were trying to shoot for that 20 active case count, see a consistent decline in trend,” said Kutscher.
“Hey, it’s time to open things up. Everybody is at that point. That’s what I hear from the taxpayers, citizens, businesses — that’s what they want to see. We can talk about how you do that and be safe but it makes it challenging to even consider that when your cases start to go back up. On the ‘to be determined’ (TBD), I think and I don’t want to make anybody upset but I’ll be very blunt and straightforward, these numbers that we report are becoming less relevant every second they are on our website, they are in the paper, that we talk about them — adding a ‘to be determined’ column basically means that 170,000 people in Guadalupe County are to be determined. It doesn’t make any sense to say that a person that has not had the right kind of test, that is not symptomatic, that hasn’t been confirmed and hasn’t talked to an epidemiologist is now yet to be determined and should be counted as a probable or likely or we can title this thing 100 different ways,” said Kutscher.
According to the DSHS, the To Be Determined Category is for those that are not symptomatic, have had no epidemiological trace to a positive tested COVID-19 person and have not received a PCR test. Officials say after a review from the state health department, if it is determined the person meets the criteria, they will be moved to the Active category. If it is determined that the person does not meet confirmed criteria, that record will then be removed entirely from the chart. Kutscher says they will be working to learn even more today about this additional “to be determined” column that has been added to its current reporting chart. He says the inaccuracy of the overall numbers just doesn’t make making decisions for county residents any easier. Now although, they will still be working with the state in making sense of the numbers, he will still continue his campaign for individual responsibility.
“Folks I think everybody is tired of COVID. Everybody is over 2020. I understand that. We have to remember two things – that we have to be careful, protect yourself, protect the community and when you don’t feel well, don’t be around people. If we would do that – practice good hygiene and when we don’t feel well, not be around each other, we don’t have anything to worry about. We could go on with our lives and move past COVID and things would take care of themselves and that’s only my opinion. I’m not talking about herd immunity going go through all this stuff trying to ruffle feathers, just saying use common sense, move forward. We look at these numbers, everybody gauges what they are going to do for the day based on the charts they’ve been seeing. They are not accurate. We’ve been talking about their inaccuracy. They are behind on numbers. They throw stuff in that shouldn’t be. There’s other counties that have given the state a lot of grief about some of these reportings. I’m not saying it’s an easy job. I’m just saying, we should put less importance and less weight on these numbers that have been put on those numbers in the past,” said Kutscher.
Kutscher says although there is one patient in the hospital and lower confirmed totals, any major change or modification made to the way things are handled will more than likely changed the way he would like to continue on with business.
“We’ve been really on a consistent decline for the last month basically so Patrick and I kind of spoke, we looked at those numbers and said if we continue to trend downward, there’s counties in the region that have fallen well below that 20 active cases– they were there for a handful of days. They didn’t do it the first hour they got notification and then they removed it. So, I had some people get online and contact the office saying ‘hey, can you remove this?’ The governor’s orders are still in place state that any county that has more than 20 active cases is required by state mandate to have masks and wear all those things but it’s at the county’s discretion when you fall under 20 active cases, to sign an order, send that to the state, give verification and approval on that and remove the mask order. So, we’ve been watching this. I was very confident. My plan was to come to commissioners court today, have this conversation and say if it was okay to the court, I’d like to talk to all the mayors at the end of this week, bring this back for specific discussion and possible action by court next Tuesday to remove those mask orders but again, the numbers just went up for the first time,” said Kutscher.
Again, Pinder is expected to learn more today about how the ‘to be determined’ (TBD) numbers will impact the overall operation of the county. In its reporting of COVID-19 cases, public releases of those numbers will now only be provided on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Those updates for the public will still be available on the Facebook page for the county emergency management office and on the county’s website.