SAN ANTONIO – The United States may be seeing a spike overall in COVID-19 cases, but it hasn’t been reflected in Bexar County numbers.
The tally for new cases in the United States Thursday reached a new record - 121,888 cases, according to a COVID-19 dashboard from Johns Hopkins University. While Bexar County case numbers have seen a increase in the past two weeks, though, it has been far from a spike.
“I’m cautiously optimistic,” Southwest Texas Regional Advisory Council (STRAC) Executive Director and CEO Eric Epley told KSAT on Friday. “I don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth. Our numbers are steady. They are not increasing dramatically like we’ve seen in other parts of the country where there is - there are huge spikes.”
Later, at the nightly briefing Friday, Mayor Ron Nirenberg announced the county had 218 new cases and a seven-day rolling average of 218, too.
The seven-day rolling average for new cases has mostly stayed above 200 since Oct. 28 - a mark it hadn’t hit since Aug. 15 on the back end of the wave of local cases this summer. The county’s highest seven-day average was recorded on July 2 at 1,255 cases, according to city data.
But you need only look at places like El Paso to see how much worse things could be.
The West Texas county is seeing a surge in cases - 1,300 new ones on Friday alone - and it’s sending patients to hospitals in other counties, including Bexar. Of the 253 COVID-19 patients in area hospitals, Epley says 46 are El Pasoans.
18 deaths, 1,300 new COVID-19 cases, and 123 delayed test results by the State are being reported this morning for a cumulative total of 59,852 cases, 23,702 active cases, and 657 deaths.
— City of El Paso (@ElPasoTXGov) November 6, 2020
For more information and other data visit https://t.co/ZQYzXomtTr pic.twitter.com/xFIlkWLOVp
“I think we’re going to see this - I don’t want to call it ‘whack-a-mole,’ but it feels a little bit like different parts of the state at any given time we’re going to see rises and dips for the rest of the of the winter and into the early spring,” Epley said.
Though he has no way to know if Bexar County will see a new spike in cases, Epley said that based on modeling he has seen, his “sense” is that - if a spike happens - it will be less severe than the summer’s.
However, he said, flu and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) season could add extra stress since those respiratory illnesses could also send people to the hospital at the same time.
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