Texas struggles with Covid tests as contact tracers bombarded

On the day in April that he announced his state would emerge from lockdown the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, said: “A core part of opening up safely is having an effective testing and tracing process – a process that can quickly identify any flare-ups in Covid-19.”As Texas flung open its doors before much of the country, it needed to lean on “doctors and data to provide the safest strategies”, Abbott went on. That has not worked out. Only four months later, Texas is nearing the grim milestone of 12,000 deaths from Covid-19, after being walloped by the virus for much of the summer.“It was never a situation we were gonna contact trace our way out of,” said Chris Van Deusen, director of media relations at the Texas department of state healthservices (DSHS). “We were seeing so many cases throughout July that doing that alone wasn’t going to stop the outbreak from spreading.”Now, discrepancies between state and county data abound in Texas. Local contact tracers are bombarded by exponentially more confirmed cases than they are equipped to handle, and Texans are still struggling with the deceptively simple distinction of which test actually confirms whether they’re infectious. Some students are already heading back to campus, including the state’s gargantuan public universities, despite pushback from co-eds and employees. Testing has dropped off in recent weeks, possibly because people are letting their guard down. And, despite mitigation efforts, a continual, alarmingly high rate of positive test results indicates that Texas won’t be able to control the virus as successfully as in other places, warned Ashish K Jha, a professor of global health at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.


All data is taken from the source: https://www.theguardian.com/
Article Link: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/28/texas-coronavirus-covid-tests-contact-tracers


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