FAYETTE COUNTY, Texas — This week, Fayette County Emergency Management Chief Craig Moreau urged county leaders to encourage conserving COVID-19 tests.
"To preserve tests, your physician or nurse practitioner may advise that if you have multiple people from a single household with identical symptoms and one of them has already tested positive, the rest may be considered a 'presumed positive,'" Moreau wrote in an email before New Year's Eve.
According to Moreau, presumed positive cases get the same treatment and recommendations as someone who tests positive.
"There's not necessarily a reason to go waste tests, expose a tester to your germs, none of those things," Moreau said in an interview with KVUE. "It's one of those kind of common-sense approaches I think will make this a little bit better."
Moreau added that while cases may be underrepresented, the more important statistic to pay attention to is hospitalizations to determine the severity of COVID-19. In the same email to county leaders, Moreau listed the omicron variant as becoming dominant in the region.
"Delta [variant] has fallen to less than 10% of new cases[.] Beta, Mu and the original COVID-19 virus are still seen occasionally but are statistically insignificant. We do not have county specific data yet, only regional data," Moreau said.
Cases across the country have shot up in recent weeks, which is no different in Fayette County.
"We're averaging about 29 new cases per day per 100,000 people, so that's a per-capita value. In the larger cities around the country, they're approaching about 300 a day, so we're significantly less," Moreau said. "But we were down to as low as four [new cases per day] recently. So four to 29 is a pretty big statistical jump. But as far as the numbers, it's not been that much. The hospitalizations so far have not followed that and, thankfully, the deaths are not following that as well, and I'm hoping that trend continues."
This week, hospitals reported people heading to emergency rooms to get tests in light of the high demand. Thursday, Baylor Scott and White Health posted on social media urging people to reserve emergency room visits for medical emergencies, not COVID-19 testing.
As cases and demand for COVID-19 testing rise, Moreau compared the surges to what he saw in the beginning of the pandemic back in March and April 2020.
"There weren't enough tests to go around," Moreau said. "If you remember, a lot of the things that were going on in early 2020 are kind of mimicking what's going on here."
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