July 22, 2020
NEW REPORTS:
2 New Resident Cases
2 Recoveries
For those who missed yesterday’s post and are confused by the sudden and steep drop in active cases, or how two new cases could be added to the total, but the number of active cases remain steady, here is the post again…
From Tuesday, July 21:
…from yesterday to today, the aggregate resident numbers are:
Active: 218 → 2
Recovered: 122 → 310
Deaths: 1 → 1
Total Cases: 341 → 313
What Just Happened?
This is probably a good time for a refresher…
Where do you get these numbers?
Monday-Friday at approximately 5pm, Region 8 of The Texas Department of Health and Human Services sends a report to the 28 counties in their jurisdiction. The Frio county resident numbers reported on this site each day are pulled directly from this report.
How is a resident reported as recovered?
Our previous daily recovered record from DSHS reports was 16 on July 6. Today, 188 were moved to the recovered category.
As reported in a June 22nd post in a section called “reporting issues,” DSHS informed counties that they would move to a “time based strategy” for reporting recoveries, which means a patient’s status would be moved to “recovered” automatically after two weeks, for the purpose of the reporting. As we noted in the original post, this is problematic for our reporting to the public for a few reasons.
- This is a shift from the recent symptom-based strategy for clearing a patient which was: (a) 3 days with no fever without use of fever-reducing medication and (b) improvement in respiratory symptoms and (c) at least 10 days have passed since symptoms appeared. Two weeks to recovery is merely an average, not a rule.
- Incidentally, the Center for Disease Control updated their symptom-based strategy yesterday to clear patients more quickly.
Why were cases removed?
We saw this happen in Bexar County last week as DSHS changed guidelines for determining a “probable” case. This website first reported the addition of “probable” cases in DSHS counts on June 20. However, based on today’s report, we do not have a definitive answer for the removal of cases from Frio’s total count.
Does this mean Frio County is in the clear?
We’re not ready to declare the end of COVID-19 in Frio.
- One day does not make a trend.
- Reporting changes seem to have affected today’s count.
- We have to look at the entirety of data, including hospitalized COVID patients. We want to see the hospitalized COVID patient count decrease along with the number of active cases over a sustained period of time.
- We must continue to practice safety measures so that these numbers continue to trend in the right direction.
Did this happen in other counties?
Four of the five adjacent counties also saw a significant drop in their active cases, but only Frio saw a drop in our total cases.
In another head scratcher, La Salle County added 23 cases in today’s DSHS aggregate report, but show only 2 active cases, which means those new cases were added directly to La Salle’s recovered column. The aggregate report had been considered the “quicker” report that included numbers without waiting for investigation, so La Salle’s numbers tell us that either today was an anomaly or our aggregate count has a serious lag…
FULL DASHBOARD CHARTS AND GRAPHS