It hardly feels worth posting this today as Week 49 was basically superseded by our Snowmageddon. The city stopped updating its numbers and holding daily briefings after last Friday. Plus, the week came down to “covid vs keeping people warm,” and of course immediate survival trumps potential spread every time. Big centers opened to house up to 500 folks who were without power and water. Vaccine and testing centers basically closed down for the week, and scheduled vaccines were moved forward a week or two. There’s no telling just how the pandemic will be affected by all this, but I don’t blame the city for doing all they could do. The power situation with the (de-regulated, privatized) statewide energy grid and the water outages that occurred because of that are just nuts. So anyway, I put together what info I could for Week 49, and I’m sure future weeks will show the rolling trends of numbers bump up and down in compensation for a bit.

Week 48 – February 5 to 11
186,346 cases, 2,387 deaths, 890 seven-day rolling average (major drop!), 9.7% positivity rate (down 1.7%). Hospitals have dropped to under 800 patients. Our local high school reported only 5 students positive for covid this week.

It’s been really good to see the numbers go down day after day. We’re far from out of the woods, but we’re getting there. Our “danger” meter for the city has been dropped down to “moderate” level, and the same for the school danger indicator. (Though, statewide, there have been 100k+ students and 60k+ staff to get covid since schools opened in September.) There’s no telling if the numbers will continue to go down, not with 1) Super Bowl home gatherings last weekend, 2) the upcoming Stock Show and Rodeo (sigh), 3) the UK variant now definitely in SA, and 4) the women’s NCAA tournament being held, entirely, in our city. I guess we’ll see. Fingers crossed.

Week 49 – February 12 to 18
Because of the Snowpocalypse this week, covid testing facilities have been closed and the city wasn’t updating info or doing news briefs for most of the week (as stated above). Even though there was an update at the end of the week, there was no case or statistical data updates for the week. Schools were also closed all week, not even bothering with virtual async classes after Monday, so my only school number (0 students, 1 staff) was as of last Friday.

Other news from the week: UHS (the health system through which I got my vaccine (which notably, I should have as full protection as possible now)) administered their 100,000th vaccine last Friday. Another pediatric covid death was reported this week. The next few Spurs games are postponed/canceled due to multiple players testing positive. We passed one year from our first covid-19 case here. (Note: This was not actually a San Antonio case. That first case was March 13th. However, when Covid first came to the US, travelers from China were quarantined for several weeks, and the US chose one of our Air Force bases in SA as the quarantine location. One of those folks was the positive test, and never had any exposure to SA folks, thus didn’t contribute to our first cases here.) Generally, though, most of our news this week was with the Snowpocalypse, which I’ll save for another post.

Moving forward
I have no idea. For the first time, everything feels really unpredictable. Before, while the predictions were bad, it at least followed fairly historically-predictable patterns! But when you start having to factor in mass gatherings for warmth/water, an energy grid failure, a water system failure, EMS out in full force to help folks who were too stupid to stay off the roads, etc? Maybe it’ll be all right and the city will make sure everyone is wearing masks at these large centers. (I doubt that’ll be possible, but I know they’ll try.) Or maybe we’ll have another surge. I don’t know. But it feels helpless and hopeless and scary right now. Especially given that we’re not fully out of the woods yet on the electricity and water issue!