(Seguin) – Guadalupe County doesn’t want to create panic with its latest report of positive COVID-19 cases. Instead, it wants to explain the significant jump in numbers.
As warned last week, the state has reportedly uncovered cases that never made it into the count for Guadalupe County.
During Tuesday’s Commissioners Court meeting, Patrick Pinder, the Guadalupe County Emergency Management Coordinator, explained this delay in the numbers.
“When Texas Health Trace took over doing the contact tracing, 1,600 cases were not accounted for. Finally, when they did their investigations, they determined there were 1,600 more cases in Guadalupe County and that’s why they added this,” said Pinder. “That goes back to March 1. Originally, we reported our first case the second weekend of Spring Break. We actually had our first case March 1. This is a six-month period. We had 1,601 new cases and out of that 1,601, there’s only 55 active,” said Pinder.
Officials say most of these older cases occurred in June and had not previously been reported to the state by health care providers. Although there was a delay, these individuals were still notified about their test results.
Pinder says Region 8 continues to review the data in hopes of continuing the accuracy of cases for the county. He says despite what the county’s current report shows, the majority of these cases, again, are no longer considered active.
“If you look at the state website today, if you go online to DSHS, they are going to show Guadalupe County has 1,658. I just told you we only have 55. If you look at the recoveries, they are going to show 1,811. We have over 2,000 recovered people. If you look at the state website, they are going to show 76 deaths, we have 42 reported deaths. Total cases that will be reflected by the state’s website are 3,545,” said Pinder.
Last week, Guadalupe County Judge Kyle Kutscher shared his frustration with the backlog in numbers including the state’s latest decision to include a TBD or To Be Determined column on its reporting chart.
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 the introduction of the TBD column and now this increase in cases has not made things any easier for the public to understand.
“I understand that there is backlog when you have multiple counties in a region when the case count when up drastically. I don’t understand from the onset –when there was a low case count, tremendous state resources and there were a lot of unknowns on how this was tracked and traced but we only had handful of cases. I don’t know how you mess that up. It just lacks a lot of credibility from the outside when the public looks at those numbers and you are reporting – ‘hey, they just had a backlog cleanup of 1,601 cases’ when you we only have 55 active and they throw them all in a column. That’s why last week, I told the public, you can’t look at these numbers and let that dictate everything that we do as a community and as an individual. We just need to be mindful of ourselves, our surroundings, use good hygiene when you are around people. It’s just disheartening when we are decision makers not just at the county but at the hospital, with the city, superintendents, school districts trying to make decisions for the public, for the community based on numbers that were not right since day one,” said Kutscher.
While the accuracy of the overall numbers continue to be ironed out, Kutscher says he will continue to focus on what he believes is most important.
“I know for a lot of the community that wanted to see mask requirements come off, we are getting further away from that magic number of 20 active cases than closer. But I also wanted to reaffirm, the thing that we’ve always been watching, in my opinion and I think Patrick follows suit, one of the most important things that we’ve been watching are the hospitalizations. We were very concerned about local resources, overwhelmingly – kind of the healthcare system in general. I think that’s what everybody should have focused on. At one point, we had 43-47 (people) – I mean it was approaching 50 people at some point. It got very high. For a seven day rolling average, it’s one or less than one or two – I think that’s really reflective and the most important number to be watching because we could have no active cases and 100 in the hospital, we have a problem. We have 2,000 active cases and nobody in the hospital, it’s not as serious of an issue as everybody may think based on the numbers so I really want the public to hone in on those numbers, on hospitalized, on the death toll. I hate saying it like that but that’s what it is the actual number of deaths and the number of people in the hospital,” said Kutscher.
Kutscher says while he believes there is light at the end of the tunnel, he still understands the trek in getting there.
“Know that things are getting better here. All the efforts that have been done by the community, all the inconvenience that everybody has put up with for a long time has made a difference and we just need to be mindful moving forward as we transition back to some normalcy, we still have to be careful because I think that is everyone’s desire, we do want as a community to give back to the way things used to be – we just have to do that in a systematic way and be careful as we do it,” said Kutscher.
Public announcement of the county’s COVID-19 cases will continue to be released Tuesdays and Thursdays. Those charts can be found on the Guadalupe County Emergency Management Office Facebook page.