This week, I’m sharing a short dispatch from the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) conference in Houston, Texas. I’m discussing the cascading health issues caused by environmental racism—including, of course, COVID-19—as well as the ways that data gaps can make it harder for hard-hit communities to get needed public health assistance.
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The COVID-19 Data Dispatch has, clearly, been pretty focused on school reopening in recent weeks. But our “Opening” project is primarily retrospective, looking back at schools that were successful last school year. This fall, the Delta variant and additional political pressures have made reopening success even harder to achieve.
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Andrews Independent School District, in West Texas, prioritized personal responsibility, giving families information to make individual choices about their children’s safety. Partnerships with the local health department, outdoor classes, increased ventilation, and an intensive cleaning regimen also helped keep cases down — even though the district did not follow all CDC protocols, such as required quarantines and masks for the youngest students.
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Anyone who’s tried to work with the federal government’s vaccination data has noticed this issue: there’s a Texas-shaped hole in the numbers. While the CDC and HHS report vaccination data for counties and metropolitan areas in the vast majority of states, data are missing for the entire state of Texas.
Read MoreThe COVID Tracking Project published a blog post this week in which three of our resident Texas experts, Conor Kelly, Judith Oppenheim, and Pat Kelly, describe a dramatic shift in Texas testing numbers which has taken place in the past two weeks. On August 2, the number of tests reported by Texas’s Department of State Health Services (DSHS) began to plummet. The state went from a reported 60,000 tests per day at the end of July to about half that number by August 12.
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In May, however, a new type of testing came on the scene. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized its first antigen test on May 9, and its second antigen test on July 6. By the end of July, both types of antigen tests had been distributed to hundreds of nursing homes across the country.
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