Coronavirus live updates July 14: Here’s what to know in the Dallas-Fort Worth area
Tarrant County reported 322 new coronavirus cases and no new deaths on Monday.
The county has recorded 18,483 cases and 272 deaths, according to Tarrant County data. The county also reports at least 8,735 recoveries.
COVID-19 patients were using about 17% of all occupied hospital beds in the county as of Monday, according to county data. About 69% of all hospital beds in the county are now occupied. About 37% of the county’s ventilators are in use.
Meanwhile, almost all key COVID-19 statistics in the county are rising.
Hospitalizations of COVID-19 patients have more than tripled since June 1. Positive cases also have more than tripled, and the seven-day average testing positivity rate has more than doubled from less than 10 percent to about 20%.
Expert: NASCAR fans in Fort Worth may be a mistake
As the novel coronavirus continues to spread, Texas Motor Speedway will welcome thousands of NASACAR fans this weekend for a race that may be one of the largest gatherings in Texas, if not the country, since the deadly outbreak began.
The crowd will certainly lead to new COVID-19 cases, one virus expert said, but speedway president Eddie Gossage said he was more concerned about the potential for triple-digit heat Sunday than the pandemic. Gov. Greg Abbott’s most recent order restricts outdoor crowds to 10 or fewer, unless organizers get special permission, but motorsports have a specific exemption.
“I don’t have any concerns. I’m going to be there, my family’s going to be there,” Gossage said. “I’m not concerned about it, if everyone will follow the directions.”
Sunday’s race will be the first time Texas has allowed fans at a professional sporting event since the outbreak began. Gossage said he is confident the experiment will prove sports can go on and may become the model for how other venues operate. He downplayed the spike in coronavirus cases, saying he didn’t believe the statistics took into account the size of the state’s population.
On Monday Tarrant County reported 322 new cases for a total of 18,483. Texas had record numbers of new cases for four consecutive days last week, including Wednesday, when a record 119 deaths were reported.
Gossage wouldn’t say how many fans he expects at the speedway. At 50% capacity, as many as 62,500 fans could show up, but Gossage said the speedway “wouldn’t come close to that.” At one point he used 20,000 as a hypothetical number.
“This looks like a mistake in the making, and there will be consequences, I would predict,” said Benjamin Neuman, a virologist and head of Texas A&M University-Texarkana’s biology department. Neuman has studied coronaviruses for more than two decades.
Neuman said it may be impossible to estimate how much the coronavirus will spread at a gathering as large as the race since most modeling stops at crowds of 100. But he was confident the race posed a high risk.
Based on “common sense and virology, epidemiology 101,” strangers gathering in any number exponentially increases the risk of spreading contagious diseases, he said. A spike in cases after the Memorial Day weekend shows that even small holiday gatherings grew the number of positive cases.
Cases surging at FMC Carswell
Sandra Shoulders feels like she’s living in a horror movie.
Every day, prison staff at FMC Carswell, a federal medical prison in Fort Worth, take about a dozen people out of her unit to get tested for COVID-19. Some of them come back; others do not.
When a woman tests positive for the virus, her mattress is dragged from the room she shares with three other people and stacked in what used to be the TV room. Every day, the mountain of mattresses grows. Shoulders tries to avoid walking past it.
The number of cases at the prison has swelled from three to 130 in the past two weeks. Inmates said they have not been allowed to leave their rooms since last week, cells are not immediately sanitized after someone tests positive, and there’s a shortage of cleaning supplies and personal protection equipment.
Out of the 1,373 women at the prison, 645 have been tested and 465 are awaiting test results, according to Bureau of Prisons data.
Estimated active cases over time
Coronavirus daily active case estimates by local counties in the Dallas - Fort Worth metroplex, beginning April 8, 2020. Data provided by Texas Health and Human Services.
This story was originally published July 14, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
