CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas – Texas officials are taking a page from Corpus Christi’s playbook and stepping up efforts to vaccinate seniors against COVID-19.
Gov. Greg Abbott announced the Save Our Seniors initiative at a news conference in Corpus Christi on Thursday, saying that more than 1,100 National Guard troops will be deployed to help communities identify homebound seniors and vaccinate them against the new coronavirus that causes COVID-19.
Recommended Videos
Corpus Christi Mayor Paulette Guajardo says the city’s fire department has administered 2,000 vaccines in the past month to homebound seniors identified by the city’s Meals on Wheels program and that 144 have been vaccinated fully.
The vaccinations came as state health officials reported 7,011 new coronavirus cases and 305 new deaths from COVID-19, the illness the coronavirus causes.
The newly reported cases and deaths pushed the number of confirmed Texas cases reported during the pandemic to 2,621,181 and the state’s pandemic death toll to almost 42,285, according to statistics compiled by the Texas Department of State Health Services. The state estimated that 179,762 COVID-19 cases are active, with 6,724 cases needing hospitalization. Both continue a slowly diminishing trend.
According to Johns Hopkins University researchers, the two-week rolling average of new cases has fallen to 5,210.7 per day, a 44.7% decrease.