Turner Sounds Alarm On Houston COVID-19 Metrics Ahead Of Potential Third Wave
On Monday afternoon, Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner and Dr. Persse of the Houston Health Department warned city residents that troubling upticks in Houston’s COVID-19 metrics could portend a dangerous coronavirus surge if people don’t take precautions soon.
Turner said that weeks of watching Houston’s COVID-19 test positivity rate decline led him to suspend the city’s coronavirus update news conferences for the past couple of weeks, but that he “felt compelled to start bringing these conferences back on a more regular basis” based on the record-setting numbers of new coronavirus cases in other parts of the country.
Houston’s COVID-19 positivity rate had crept up to 6.5 percent as of Friday, Turner said, which represents a 1.1 percent uptick in a 14-day span. The city had previously celebrated hitting its long-held 5 percent positivity rate milestone two weeks earlier, back on October 9th (the rate tends to tick upward a few decimal points as testing data trickles in to the health department).
“It’s moving in the wrong direction. Before it goes much further than that, it is important for us to sound the alarm for people in the city of Houston,” Turner said.
Read more: https://www.houstonpress.com/news/turner-sounds-alarm-on-local-covid-19-metrics-11507346