WilCo Coronavirus Cases Reach 7,581, 105 Deaths

WILLIAMSON COUNTY, TX — The positivity rate for cases of the coronavirus in Williamson County continued its upward trend on Tuesday at nearly 10 percent on Tuesday — up about two percentage points from the previous day.

The rate at which coronavirus tests are confirmed as positive has been around 8 percent for the past nine days or so — dipping as low as 7.9 percent between Aug. 9-17. But on Tuesday, the seven-day rolling rate for positive cases was input on a health district statistical dashboard at 9.93 percent. Still, that's a far cry from the 33.3 percent positivity rate recorded on June 28.

Despite the small uptick on Tuesday, Williamson County and Cities Health District officials see the data as emblematic of a plateau rather than a prolonged increase. “Cases have hit a plateau at an average of 81 new cases a day in the last 7 days,” officials said in a prepared statement on Tuesday. “Hospitalizations have stabilized at a higher level than before the surge in cases in June-July.”

County officials on Aug. 1 stopped issuing separate news releases alerting to deaths of the illness, missives that included words of comfort and advice from Wiliamson County Judge Bill Gravell. The practice — which included identifying the gender and age rage of victims — made the continuing reach of the coronavirus accessible to residents rather than an abstraction drawn from news reports. Now, county officials direct residents to the statistics-laden dashboard to see the hard data.

Visit the Williamson County and Cities Health District dashboard to examine coronavirus statistics for the region. The latest data show 7,581 confirmed cases to date, with an estimated 766 active cases.

On that dashboard, health district officials report 6,712 recoveries. But of late, officials have warned residents as to the provisional nature of the that data in a lengthy disclaimer found on the dashboard: "Recoveries are not a reportable condition to Public Health, therefore, recovery data are not absolute and are to be used for estimating purposes only. No trends or other inferences should be drawn from these data. The numbers posted represent a point in time snapshot and may fluctuate throughout the day. Deaths and recovered are included in the total positive cases. Hospital capacity data are only representative of the hospitals that have reported in the last 24 hours. These data are provisional and are subject to change at any time."

On Aug. 10, health district officials also alerted residents the results for Aug. 8 showing 648 additonal cases were the result of a reporting backlog. The majority of those cases dated to June and July, officials added.

Also, a recent change in the way deaths are calculated has led to different counts, health officials reported on July 29. The total number of deaths are now reported and verified by the Texas Department of State Health Services, which is now using death certificates instead of local health district reports to count COVID-19 fatalities. As a result, local health district officials said, fatality counts may be significantly lower than previously reported as seen in the downgraded count of 77 when the change was first revealed. Given the changed methodology, the timeline between that lowered amount to the 105 historical deaths reported to date — a difference of 28 — is unclear.