PFLUGERVILLE, Texas — Austin Public Health tracks ZIP codes with the highest number of COVID-19 cases. For the month of July, the city of Pflugerville leads that list. KVUE's Bryan Mays sat down with Pflugerville Mayor Victor Gonzalez to discuss Pflugerville's rising case numbers.
Mayor Victor Gonzalez: Thank you, Bryan. It's 78660 ZIP code, which happens to be one of the largest ZIP codes in the Travis County area. And it is inclusive and has a diverse combination of Austin ETJ, Round Rock ETJ and Pflugerville ETJ, including the city of Pflugerville. So those are the all-inclusive numbers that you probably see in there. And so the incidents and certainly the high numbers bring that to our attention. As a community and as elected officials, we have to be very responsive to those particular numbers.
Bryan Mays: How do you respond when you see those numbers like that? What as a government can you do to try to get those numbers down?
Mayor Victor Gonzalez: Well, there's probably a number of things that we can do. And as we've done in the past, Bryan, you know, we did have a testing center in Pflugerville during the early stages of COVID-19. And so that was very helpful in getting our community out and getting them tested. One of the things that we certainly we rely on is Austin Public Health and there are a number of options for our citizens today in terms of availability for testing, especially at CVS, Walgreens, and Community Care Clinic, they have one here in Pflugerville as well. And let me say that there's certainly a community issue, but it's a regional and statewide issue that we all have to address collectively. But we have a number of resources that we utilize – our social media very heavily gets information out to our citizens, alerting them to where we are. I think everybody knows we're at Stage Five and "what does that mean to everybody?" That's the information we're sending out via our website, Facebook page, every avenue that we can to get that message out to our citizens.
Bryan Mays: Mayor, we've seen vaccine hesitancy has been prevalent across the nation, really parts of Texas as well. Are you seeing that vaccine hesitancy in Pflugerville? And what can the city do to try to encourage more people to get vaccinated?
Mayor Victor Gonzalez: We want to encourage our citizens to get vaccinated. As a matter of fact, as we mentioned earlier, this 78660 ZIP code, or Pflugerville ZIP code, has the largest number of cases. But by the same token, Austin Public Health keeps track of vaccination utilization. And there again, 78660 happens to have one of the higher vaccination experiences in the Travis County area. So we do encourage our citizens to do that. Austin Public Health has a number of resources. They even have in-home testing. But certainly, vaccination resources are going to be very important to our citizens. And again, as I said earlier, CVS, Walgreens, a number of urgent care clinics are a number of options that are available to our citizens to be able to get that first vaccine or, depending on what vaccine they take, at least get vaccinated as an effort to minimize COVID-19.
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