COMAL COUNTY, Texas — Health experts in Comal County are hoping Labor Day starts a new trend.
The New Braunfels area has seen spikes in coronavirus cases following the last three holidays, in a situation mirroring that of San Antonio's summer.
Local leaders say the community has made progress, but with novel coronavirus cases beginning to decline in recent weeks, they said it’s important that celebrations this weekend don’t undo the improvements made over the last few weeks.
“We've seen jumps in cases after every major holiday. So Memorial Day, Father's Day, Fourth of July—that's when we started seeing increases in cases,” said Dorothy Overman, Comal County's health authority. “Social gatherings of family and friends leads to a lot of sharing of infection and spread of this virus, and it's something that's a big topic on our minds as we're facing this Labor Day holiday.”
As of Friday morning, Comal County had reported 288 active coronavirus cases and 40 current hospitalizations.
“The experts know that we probably have five to 10 times that number of active cases. So we may have as many as up to 3,000 active cases in our community at this time because there are many cases that are asymptomatic, meaning that they have the virus but never develop any symptoms,” Overman said. “Then there are cases who have very mild symptoms and may not go to the doctor or ever get a test. So we still have virus in the community and we still need to continue all of the things that we've put in place.”
In an update from Comal County medical professionals held online this week, they pointed out what has helped bring the case count down, following a big spike in cases in July.
“We are seeing some very good results of wearing masks, the mask order with social distancing and what all the businesses have put into place that have got our cases down,” Overman said.
The community has been waiting to see how schools reopening would impact those numbers. Overman says so far, so good.
“We're only two weeks in for our public schools. We are seeing some cases in schools, but those individual cases are children who they got the virus outside of school. So far, we haven't seen spread within the school. That is huge and amazing.
"They have them all wearing masks, they have them doing social distancing, they're doing huge, huge amounts of hand hygiene and cleaning. So, they're doing all the right things. Unfortunately, this virus is very contagious and I think that we will see more cases as we go along.”
She says we can all take a page from their book.
“We need families in our community to do as good a job as the schools have done,” Overman said. “We need people to be wearing masks and not have social gatherings.”