City announces end to COVID-19 news conferences, distribution of report cards
In Wednesday’s final regularly scheduled COVID-19 news conference, Amarillo Mayor Ginger Nelson said it was the end of an era for the city.
“We are putting down a mark in the timeline of our city’s history today,” she said. “It has me reflecting on other hard times that our city has been through, whether it was the 1920’s and the Dust Bowl era or the 2020’s and the pandemic era. What I know is that Amarillo is still here and this last year, we have spent a lot of time and energy focused on surviving. It’s time for transition now. It’s time to transition into more of a thriving mindset.”
City officials announced Wednesday that there will no longer be regular COVID-19 news conferences providing members of the community local updates of how the pandemic is affecting Potter and Randall counties and area hospitals. Officials also announced that the final COVID-19 report card will be released Friday, with the COVID-19 information continuing to be updated regularly on the Amarillo Alerts webpage.
Potter and Randall counties saw an increase of 15 COVID-19 cases from Tuesday, according to Wednesday’s COVID-19 report card, bringing the area’s total to 34,359 cases since the start of the pandemic. Of the total, 509 are active, which is a decrease of 12 net active cases. There have been 33,093 COVID-19 recoveries and 757 deaths related to the virus.
According to a news release from the city, the public health department released the first COVID-19 report card on March 23, 2020, providing a total of 309 report cards since that time. The first COVID-19 news conference was on April 1, 2020, eventually transitioning from three times a week to a weekly format. There have been 68 news conferences, city officials stated.
The fact that the city has reached this point makes Brian Weis, chief medical officer at Northwest Texas Healthcare System, feeling overjoyed. As of Wednesday, Northwest has seven COVID-19 patients hospitalized, five of whom are in the intensive care unit.
“I am ecstatic that as a community, we have reached this point where, hopefully, we can put the vast majority of COVID-19 in the rearview mirror,” he said. “Even more, is instead of that same tired message every week of ‘wear your mask…,’ now, I am asking to please get vaccinated so you don’t have to wear your mask anymore. That’s the take-home message today.”
Officials with BSA Health System were not present on Wednesday’s call, but Weis said BSA is showing the same downward trends as Northwest, even though their numbers are in the double-digits.
While there are new cases within the community, Scott Milton, the city’s public health authority and an associate professor at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, said it is mainly related to younger individuals who are “relatively healthy.”
“We continue to see cases, over 500 still in the community,” Milton said. “But our hospitalizations have not gone up I think because we have tried to target the vaccine to those who are most at risk of getting really sick from this.”
All participants in Wednesday’s final conference, ranging from city officials to medical professionals, continued to stress the importance of receiving the COVID-19 vaccine.
Rodney Gonzalez, chief medical officer at the Amarillo VA Healthcare System, said his hospital, like the others in the area as well as the city site, will continue to offer the vaccine free of charge. The Amarillo VA Healthcare System currently has zero COVID-19 inpatients hospitalized.
“Even though these broadcasts (are) coming to an end, even though we are watching us on the right end of this pandemic, I just encourage anyone who has not gotten vaccinated to please get vaccinated,” Gonzalez said.
Nelson thanked the viewers for relying on the news conference as a way to get information on the area’s COVID-19 status.
“We have had each other. While we haven’t been able to see you on the other side of this screen, we’ve known you were there,” she said. “You have been watching and (we) have been doing this journey together as a city and that makes me so very proud as a leader, knowing that when things got hard, we came together. I wanted to say thank you. Thank you for watching. Thank you for your prayers. Thank you for the faith that you had in both our God and in our local medical community and our local elected officials and our public health officials.”
To close her comments during Wednesday’s conference, Nelson said she had a tremendous amount of gratitude on her heart.
“I am so very glad that we are through this,” she said. “We really made history together.”
The next COVID-19 report card, serving as the second to last report card from the city of Amarillo, will be released Thursday afternoon.
For more information on the city’s response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, as well as information regarding current COVID-19 vaccine availability from the city’s walk-in vaccination clinic, visit www.amarilloalerts.comwww.amarilloalerts.com.
For the most current number of COVID-19 cases outside of Potter and Randall counties, visit the Texas Department of State Health Services website at www.dshs.texas.gov/coronavirus.
