May 6, 2020 245 PM
TRI-COUNTY — As The Big Bend Sentinel reported last week, the tri-county region saw a huge bump in testing numbers after the state brought mobile testing facilities to the region, including to Marfa, Alpine, Terlingua and Presidio. More such pop-up testing sites are coming this weekend, with stops in Fort Davis (on May 10) and Presidio (on May 11).
Local doctors are short on testing supplies and therefore have limited who gets tested. The state’s mobile testing centers, on the other hand, are open to everyone. So it’s perhaps no surprise that the previous round of mobile testing now accounts for a majority of the tri-county’s testing total. Two hundred twenty-nine people have been tested in the region, Ekta Escovar, a member of the local COVID-19 task force and the local health authority for Brewster County, told The Big Bend Sentinel on Tuesday. Of those, around 185 people — including 64 in Marfa — were tested at mobile testing sites.
Those sites yielded results. Around 155 people received the good news that they were likely negative for coronavirus.
On the other hand, one patient — a person in their 60s in South Brewster County — learned that they were positive for coronavirus, marking the first confirmed case in the tri-county region. Luckily, the count of known active cases has now dropped back down to zero, after Escovar said at a Alpine City Council meeting Tuesday night that the patient has recovered.
But for around 30 patients who were tested at those centers, local health authorities have still received no information on their status. That’s a whopping 16 percent — and it’s left officials throughout the region wondering if they have another case.
“They’re getting bottlenecked,” Escovar said of those 30 tests, citing conversations with labs. Given the slow increase in state testing, that explanation makes sense. But it raises serious questions about the strategy behind the Texas “reopening,” which is ostensibly using this data to determine how much (and how quickly) Texans can return to semi-normal life.
With the next round of mobile tri-county testing just days away, Escovar worries local health officials will have to start sifting through the next round of testing data before they even know the results from the last round.
“I hope we can close a chapter before we open the next one,” she said.
Over 900 Texans have died by press time on Wednesday, up from around 700 at press time last week. Around 33,500 Texans are known to have coronavirus, up from about 27,000 last week.
Measured by sheer numbers, the coronavirus continues to have an increasing impact on Far West Texas. El Paso added over 200 new cases, going from around 850 to just under 1,100. Midland-Odessa also saw more modest increases, with Ector County’s case-count increasing from 78 to 85 and Midland County’s from 75 to 90.
But as Texans argue about how to best balance public health needs against financial considerations, the economic fallout from coronavirus is also growing. Around 5,000 people made unemployment claims in Far West Texas last week, Workforce Solutions Borderplex said in a report on Monday.
Since March 29, over 130 people have filed for unemployment in Marfa, as have over 200 in Presidio. In a report last month, the group pegged Presidio County’s unemployment rate at 10.2 percent.
