EDINBURG — As the Hidalgo County health department continues to sift through the backlog of positive COVID-19 cases, Chief Administrative Officer Eddie Olivarez said they’re considering moving away from reporting the daily positive cases.
During a meeting of the city of Edinburg’s public health task force, Olivarez told the members that given the onslaught of COVID cases being reported by the hundreds of test providers throughout the county, that he was trying to focus on reporting COVID-19 hospitalizations, fatalities and positive cases at schools.
“We’re moving from a pandemic to an endemic where COVID is commonplace so the positivity rates really don’t have as big of an influence as they used to have,” Olivarez said after the meeting.
He added that with so much home testing taking place, which are not required to be reported to the county, and with all the testing being conducted by the more than 170 vendors in Hidalgo County, it’s become more difficult to manage that information.
“We want to focus more on the number of hospitalized, the number in ICU, the number of pediatric hospitalizations,” Olivarez said. “We want to focus on the school numbers, focus on fatalities, that’s the direction we’re wanting go.”
However, Olivarez was clear that it was still unclear whether the health and human services department would make that change and said it was still something they are looking into.
“We’re reviewing it with our leadership at the county, we’re reviewing it with the state and trying to come up with a model,” Olivarez said. “Many counties already do that throughout Texas, we’re one of the counties that hasn’t converted to that model yet but we need to review that with our leadership and review with Dr. (Ivan) Melendez, our medical authority.”
This week, the county reported more than 22,000 positive cases that had been backlogged which was on top of the more than 23,000 backlogged cases the county reported in February.
At the time, he acknowledged that it was difficult to have an accurate count on positivity because of home testing and because of the 20 to 30 minutes it takes to log a single case.
Olivarez also agreed that COVID hospitalizations tend to be better indicator of the COVID-19 situation, signaling whether there is a need for more staff, beds, or equipment.
As for how he felt about how COVID was currently impacting the county, Olivarez said he was hopeful but guarded.
“I’m hopeful that there are not going to be any more variants or at least something that’s more controllable,” he said. “But for right now, it’s looking more positive, it’s looking good.”
“We’ll see what happens with Spring Break,” he added. “A lot of people are going to be traveling for Spring Break so we’ll see what happens there.”
