Karen Gleason
The city’s overall COVID situation is showing slight improvement, and ongoing efforts to vaccinate residents are providing a hopeful light at the end of the pandemic tunnel.
City Emergency Management Coordinator John Sheedy reviewed the latest COVID-19 numbers with members of the Del Rio City Council during Tuesday’s city council meeting.
Sheedy compared the current numbers with those given during the last presentation on Jan. 11.
“We can see that our active cases on that date (Jan. 11) had gone up 9.8 percent. Today, we’ve gone down from that, so we’re going the right direction. . . Our active cases are continually decreasing, and as far as our hospitalizations, we had 15 locally and 37 out-of-county transfers on Jan. 11. We’ve now got 20 in the hospital here, and 35 transfers,” Sheedy told the council.
He said as of Jan. 25, the county has had 169 deaths due to COVID-19, with five additional deaths still under investigation.
“One of the most important figures we look at is our seven-day positivity rate, and two weeks ago, our seven-day positivity rate was at 31.87 percent. We are seeing – and I don’t want to speak out of school too much – but it does seem like we’re seeing a little bit of a reprieve, slightly, so this is certainly an encouraging number, with 25.02 percent today, to see that our seven-day positivity rate is decreasing somewhat,” Sheedy said.
He told the council there are a total of 4,602 persons registered to be vaccinated through the city’s web site using the English language form, and there are 272 who have registered using the Spanish language form.
Sheedy reviewed the vaccination information and forms available on the city’s web site. He encouraged everyone who signs up to be vaccinated to have the form filled out when they arrive for their vaccination appointment to make the process more efficient.
He said the majority of the problems with the vaccination event stemmed from persons who shared their emails with friends or relatives who also wanted to sign up for a vaccine, noting the system was set up to recognize only one email per appointment.
“We realized there were a lot of parents or caregivers who are letting other people use their emails, and that caused a problem, and we have fixed that,” Sheedy said.
Sheedy also presented a new informational sheet to explain who can sign up for vaccinations, adding currently the state is still concentrating on persons who quality under Phase 1A and Phase 1B.
“Then we just have to wait for doses to be delivered, and that’s what we’re waiting on,” he said.
“Priorities are not based on who signed up first. It’s going to be the specifics related to you individually, your age and medical condition, things like that,” he added.
Sheedy lauded those involved in planning and executing the first community vaccination clinic Saturday.
“It seems like we got a really good community response on our first clinic. I want to thank everybody. It was truly, truly, truly a team effort,” Sheedy said.
