Will Tarrant County see a holiday COVID-19 spike? It may depend on public behavior
Tarrant County’s COVID-19 positivity rate and other indicators of the coronavirus’ spread are beginning to increase after falling for two months.
Is it a cause for concern?
“A cause for caution,” Public Health Director Vinny Taneja told the Star-Telegram on Tuesday following the county commissioners meeting.
Most recent data shows slight increases in the county’s seven-day test positivity rate (6.26%) and hospital beds occupied by COVID-19 patients (nearly 5%). The trends mirror what was seen last year after Halloween, Taneja said.
Whether this turn leads to another spike depends largely on public behavior, he said. The 2020 holiday season brought the height of the pandemic in Tarrant County and across the country.
“If we continue to wear masks, avoid large crowds, get our vaccines done, we should be able to avoid it,” Taneja said.
There’s been limited mask usage as numbers have dropped across the county, Taneja said. When he goes into stores, he said he sees only a handful of people still wearing masks. While Taneja said he hopes these people are vaccinated, the vaccination rates tell him otherwise. In Tarrant County, only 55% of the population over 5 is fully vaccinated, according to the staete.
“I have to assume half of those folks are not vaccinated,” Taneja said.
The latest trends find themselves in a new climate as the nation has evolved to better handle the virus. COVID-19 vaccines are now widely available to all members of the population — including the Pfizer vaccine for kids — and booster shots for all vaccine types are available for those who are considered high-risk. Just last week, the county dropped the COVID-19 spread level to “substantial” after it was in the “high” category since July. The county’s definition for community spread level depends on cases per 100,000 residents and the percentage of positive tests over seven days.
Taneja said it’s hard to tell whether an increase in cases would be as bad as what we saw last year. With the summer spike, Taneja pointed out that the people who were mainly affected were the unvaccinated.
“We still have a lot of unvaccinated people in our community, so that’s my concern or worry that we do have folks that are not protected because they’re not vaccinated,” Taneja said.
Gatherings are expected around the holidays, Taneja said, so there’s an expectation that there will be a bump in activity — though he hoped it wouldn’t be as bad as last year. Taneja and his team expected numbers to be in a decline at this point in the year, he said.
At the end of October, Taneja and another health expert from the University of North Texas’ Health Science Center School of Public Health were optimistic about decreased case counts.
Until more people are vaccinated, one expert said at the time, we may see waves. The same expert anticipated an uptick in cases come the holidays due to travel and people not being as cautious as they may have been last year.
“This is not about politics at all, right?” Taneja said. “I mean, people can have opinion about things, but we, you know, live by and die by the science of things. And so our job is to make sure people understand that vaccines are safe, they’re effective, they’re approved.”
This story was originally published November 16, 2021 at 4:23 PM.
