Judge's Interview: Lag in reporting COVID-19 recoveries

Hannigan's Notebook

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Judge's Interview: Lag in reporting COVID-19 recoveries

Jul 15, 2020

(Courtesy photo: County Judge Wade McKinney.)

Note: This interview was recorded via Zoom on Tuesday, July 14.

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By Michael V. Hannigan

The COVID-19 numbers continue to go up in Henderson County, with 63 new cases reported between July 10 through July 13.

Well, not all the numbers. There was one recovery reported between June 26 and July 13.

While it seems doubtful that just a single COVID-19 patient in Henderson County recovered in the past 17 days, let’s put the conspiracy theories on hold for a minute. There is another likely cause.

The influx of new cases has overloaded our public health department.

“What they have had to do at NET Health is they’ve had to focus their available resources toward continuing the contact tracing and they have put on the back burner the release of the updated numbers for recoveries,” said County Judge Wade McKinney.

This idea that the coronavirus reporting structure has been overwhelmed is something McKinney and I discussed in last week’s interview. NET Health covers seven counties and just one person is assigned to cover Henderson County’s data.

“It’s not just here, it is across the entire state,” said McKinney, pointing out that while Governor Greg Abbott announced the need to add 4,000 individuals to do contract tracing, the state has only been able to add about 2,000.