April 22, 2020 522 PM
FAR WEST TEXAS — At press time on Wednesday, the tri-county area has no known cases of the coronavirus. But faced with strict testing rules and a lack of testing supplies — Texas has some of the lowest testing rates in the nation — doctors in the region are now presuming that some patients are positive without testing them.
Since those presumptive positives come from individual doctors recommendations rather than state tests, there is no official count of presumed positive cases in the area. Ekta Escovar, a local health authority for Brewster County and a member of the local COVID-19 task force, said there is “no way” to get those figures. She called state testing protocols “really disappointing.”
Forty tri-county residents have received testing for coronavirus to-date, Escovar said at a Brewster County meeting on Wednesday. Of those, zero cases have been positive and zero are pending.
Across the region, El Paso County on Wednesday had at least 587 cases, according to the latest state figures.
Midland County has at least 65 cases and Odessa’s Ector County has 61. Crane County has two cases. Pecos County has five. And Reeves County has around three cases, according to the county’s local hospital — though state figures are still recording zero cases there, for reasons that are not yet entirely clear.
Overall, Texas has more than 21,000 cases and around 550 deaths. Around 200,000 people have been tested — less than one percent of the state.
The biggest outbreaks in Texas so far have been in Houston (with around 5,000 cases reported in Harris County) and in the Dallas area (with around 2,500 cases reported for Dallas County).
Nationwide, the United States continues to have the one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in the world. More than 800,000 Americans are known to have coronavirus. More than 45,000 have died.
In a late Tuesday announcement, Texas Governor Greg Abbott told local officials that the National Guard will be conducting testing in Marfa, Presidio, Alpine and Terlingua as part of a testing effort throughout the state. Testing is scheduled for Marfa on Saturday and Presidio city on Sunday.
Abbott said each facility will have the capacity to test up to 150 people, though local officials have heard 60-80 tests will be provided at each testing site in the region.
