Restaurants and Other Businesses can Open up to 75% Occupancy
Restaurants, retail stores and office buildings will now be able to operate at 75% capacity, Abbott said. Three regions — the Rio Grande Valley, Laredo and Victoria — were excluded from the loosening of restrictions, however.
Gov. Greg Abbott loosens coronavirus restrictions for restaurants and other businesses in most regions of Texas
"Gov. Greg Abbott loosens coronavirus restrictions for restaurants and other businesses in most regions of Texas" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
Gov. Greg Abbott announced Thursday that most of Texas will be able to loosen some coronavirus restrictions, including letting many businesses increase their capacity to 75%, as soon as Monday.
The standard that Abbott unveiled applies to the 19 out of 22 hospital regions in the state where coronavirus patients make up less than 15% of all hospitalizations. In those 19 regions, businesses that have been open at 50% capacity will be permitted to expand to 75% capacity — a group of places that includes retail stores, restaurants and office buildings. Hospitals in those regions will also be allowed to offer normal elective procedures again, and nursing homes can reopen for visitations under certain standards.
The three hospital regions excluded from the new reopening stage are in the Rio Grande Valley, Laredo and Victoria. Abbott said those regions’ hospitalizations are still “in the danger zone.”
At the same time, Abbott said the state was not yet ready to reopen bars, saying they are “nationally recognized as COVID-spreading locations.” He stressed, though, that the state is looking for ways to let bars reopen safely.
Abbott unveiled the new standard during a news conference at the Texas Capitol that marked Abbott’s first major announcement about the reopening process since early summer. In late June, Abbott shut down bars and ordered restaurants to scale back to 50% capacity as case numbers started to surge.
Days later, Abbott issued a statewide mask mandate.
A few weeks later, key coronavirus metrics began to trend downward. Those statistics include daily new cases, daily new deaths, hospitalizations and the positivity rate. For example, the state reported 3,249 hospitalizations Wednesday, a drop from several days in July when the tally was above 10,000 but still higher than springtime numbers than hovered around 2,000 or lower. Also on Wednesday, the seven-day average of daily new cases was 3,415 — again, a significant decline from July highs but still clearly above the levels in April, May and June.
Still, there have been regular questions about the reliability of the state data. On Monday, state health officials announced they were changing the way they calculate the positivity rate — the ratio of cases to tests — an acknowledgment that the previous method was flawed.
Democrats noted the data issues in their pushback to Abbott’s news conference.
“Gov. Abbott’s press conference today was notable for what he didn’t say,” state Rep. Chris Turner of Grand Prairie, who chairs the House Democratic Caucus, said in a statement. "There was no mention of a contact tracing program, no mention of improving the state’s unreliable data and no mention of expanding Medicaid to increase access to health care for the millions of Texans who are uninsured.”
The Texas Democratic Party said Abbott is "basing his decisions on dirty data."
Abbott began the news conference hailing the state’s progress in the fight against coronavirus, saying the “biggest reason” for improvements has been that Texans are taking the pandemic seriously and exercising personal responsibility.
The governor reminded Texans that doctors have said the goal is not to eradicate the virus but to “contain the disease, to limit its harm and to maximize the health care system’s ability to treat both COVID patients as well as other medical needs of the community.”
When it comes to further reopenings, he emphasized the state will consider all data but “rely most heavily” on hospitalizations, calling that metric the “most important information about the severity of COVID in any particular region.” It is also the “most accurate information available on a daily basis,” Abbott said.
To that end, the regions that will be allowed to further reopen must have seen coronavirus hospitalizations makes up less than 15% of all hospitalizations for seven consecutive days, according to the governor. If coronavirus hospitalizations rise above the 15% threshold for seven consecutive days in a region, a "course correction is going to be needed," Abbott said, suggesting the solution would be a reversal of the area's latest reopenings.
In addition to stores, restaurants and offices, the business that will be able to shift to 75% capacity on Monday include manufacturers, museums, libraries and gyms.
As for elective procedures, Abbott said the restoration is effective immediately. In early July, also as part of Abbott's response to the statewide surge, Abbott expanded a ban on elective surgeries to cover more than 100 counties across much of the state.
The new rules governing nursing-home visitation go into effect Sept. 24. They apply to "all nursing-home facilities, assisted-living centers, state-supported living centers and other long-term care facilities," Abbott said.
After Abbott’s news conference, the state Health and Human Services Commission detailed the new visitation rules. They allow residents to designate up to two “essential family caregivers” who will be trained and then permitted to to go inside a resident’s room for a scheduled visit. The designated caregivers do not have to socially distance from the resident, but only one is allowed to visit at a time.
This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2020/09/17/greg-abbott-texas-coronavirus/.
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Testing Backlogs Skewed Coronavirus Data
The Texas Department of State Health Services said it will now rely on a calculation that takes into account the date on which a coronavirus test was administered, rather than when it was reported.
Texas officials change how the state reports positivity rate after testing backlogs skewed coronavirus data
"Texas officials change how the state reports positivity rate after testing backlogs skewed coronavirus data" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
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Texas health officials announced Monday that they are changing the way the state reports a key metric used to evaluate the extent of coronavirus infection, a move that conceded that the state’s previous method of calculating the “positivity rate” muddied the extent of viral transmission by mixing old data with new.
The Texas Department of State Health Services said it will now “primarily rely” on a new calculation of the daily positivity rate — defined as the share of tests that yield positive results — that takes into account the date on which a coronavirus test was administered. Officials said the new metric will give a more accurate representation of viral transmission in Texas on a given day.
It also means that each day’s positivity rate will be an oft-changing number, fluctuating as officials collect lab results over time. Labs and hospitals report their test results to the state with varying degrees of timeliness, and state officials will have to recalculate the positivity rates for previous days as more test results from those dates pour in.
That’s a departure from the current system, which calculates the positivity rate based on the date the health agency receives test results, which can be weeks or even months after the tests were administered.
It marks the latest in a series of data methodology changes and corrections health officials have issued over the course of the pandemic.
While touting the new reporting method as an improvement, state officials defended the old system as providing the best information that was available at the time. The new positivity rate for the most part closely resembles the old metric, particularly when viewed as a trend line over time, officials said.
Health department spokesperson Chris Van Deusen said in an email that the different positivity rates generally moved in parallel until about August, when the state reported dumps of test results. “As long as the test results and new cases were reported fairly close in time, the case reported date was working as a metric,” he said.
Asked if the health department had concerns about the accuracy of the positivity rate before August, Van Deusen said, “We have to go off of the data that we have.”
The state said it will begin releasing the positivity rate under both the new and old methods later Monday. Health officials said they will publish a third positivity rate metric, which is calculated based on when lab results were reported to a national disease surveillance system, NEDSS, which officials said would reduce reporting lag time.
In its announcement, the Texas Department of State Health Services said the new calculations for the positivity rate will provide a more accurate representation of coronavirus transmission on any given day. It said the change was made after technology improvements last month improved the department's ability to use data from labs and other testing sites. The agency said that until recently, it wasn’t able to track test results by the date they were administered.
The state can now process about 100,000 lab reports per day, officials said, compared with about 45,000 per day before August.
“As the COVID-19 pandemic evolves, so must the data we share,” Texas Department of State Health Services Commissioner John Hellerstedt said in a prepared statement. “Our information must provide the clearest possible picture of what is happening now and what has occurred in the past.”
Gov. Greg Abbott has pointed to the positivity rate as one metric that guides the state’s response to the pandemic, helping policymakers calibrate the level of restrictions placed on bars and restaurants, for example. Abbott has previously said that a rate above 10% would be considered a red flag. According to the state's old calculations, the rate regularly exceeded that level in late June, after Abbott began allowing businesses to reopen in phases in early May.
The department did not immediately respond to a question about whether it agrees with the governor’s threshold.
Health experts have raised questions about the value of the old metric since it included test results from widely variable time periods, and they have pointed out the limitations of the state’s data.
“The numbers that we see from the county health departments or the state health department … they're not useless, but they are highly qualified and unreliable in terms of studying the trend,” Rajesh Nandy, associate professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at the University of North Texas Health Science Center at Fort Worth, has said.
Coronavirus test results vastly undercount the extent of viral transmission; researchers estimate that the true number of coronavirus cases could be more than 10 times the number of positive tests. As many as half of the people who contract the virus may never experience symptoms and may not seek out testing.
Texas health officials said Monday that the positivity rate is just one of many metrics that inform disease surveillance. After a midsummer surge that overwhelmed some Texas hospitals, particularly in South Texas, the state’s number of coronavirus hospitalizations has fallen in August and September. Still, rates of viral spread and hospitalizations are higher now than they were before Abbott began the phased reopening of businesses in May. More than 14,000 Texans have died from the virus, according to the state’s accounting.
The decision to start calculating and posting the additional positivity rates began this summer, when thousands of backlogged tests were added to the health department’s reporting system, causing the positivity rate to spike, health department officials said.
Part of that logjam — some 350,000 of more than 850,000 tests — had accumulated because the state could not process enough test results each day before an Aug. 1 system upgrade. Labs have also struggled to upload their test results to the state’s system, with formatting errors and glitches as minor as an errant question mark sometimes causing monthslong delays. Local officials and lawmakers have called the data “meaningless” and “inaccurate.”
Just Sunday, San Antonio officials shared a health department email that revealed more backlogs — this time of roughly 205,000 test results from HCA Houston Healthcare, including 21,366 positive cases extending as far back as March. Baylor Scott and White and the health department’s own lab in Austin also encountered a “routing error” during the system upgrade that prevented some 140,000 test results from June to the present from being processed into NEDSS.
Van Deusen said some of the cases were reported to local health departments despite the “routing error.”
“I wish I could guarantee there would never be another IT issue that interrupts lab reports, but that’s probably not realistic,” Van Deusen said.
About 800 facilities have registered or are in the process of working with the health department to submit test results — many of them long-term care facilities, including nursing homes that are now under a federal mandate to regularly test staff for the first time, Van Deusen said. The department could not immediately provide a number for how many labs already testing Texans have been unable to upload their results into the state system so far.
The state has hired health technology company Persivia to help improve the reporting process. Another consultant, Deloitte, joined the Department of Information Resources and Abbott’s office in working with DSHS to improve “data quality and transparency,” the health department said.
State data will also start to more accurately and efficiently separate tests by county, which could eliminate a large pool of tests that have been stubbornly categorized as “pending assignment” without being tied to a specific county, health officials said.
Disclosure: The University of North Texas Health Science Center, Baylor Scott and White, and Deloitte have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2020/09/14/texas-coronavirus-positivity-rate/.
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