In a toll ‘too much to measure,’ S.A.’S COVID deaths top 4,000
San Antonio has reached a grim milestone: more than 4,000 Covid-19-related deaths since the pandemic started.
On Thursday, public health officials reported 21 new deaths, bringing Bexar County’s coronavirus death toll to 4,017; the count has risen by more than 400 in less than six weeks.
“The toll has been acute in our community. The toll on individual families has been too much to measure. I have a colleague who lost seven family members,”
Mayor Ron Nirenberg said during a televised COVID-19 briefing Thursday night. “So we talk about where we’re at with numbers … and we’re quick to remind folks that every single one of those numbers is a mother, a father, a grandmother — someone lost who has been dearly missed.”
Nirenberg said the more than 4,000 lives lost should put some of the bickering over wearing masks into perspective.
Those dying of COVID have disproportionately been Hispanic and Latino, while the vast majority of these deaths are among people who have not been fully vaccinated, San Antonio Metropolitan Health District officials said.
“Some of these recent deaths have been completely unnecessary,” Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff said. “That’s what’s so sad. Before we had vaccines it was a different story.”
Metro Health Director Claude Jacob said his organization has identified only six fully vaccinated people who died from COVID-19, and in those cases, there were underlying health issues.
The coronavirus took its first three lives in the San Antonio area March 28, 2020, when the emerging crisis had just begun to
shut down cities across the nation. Since then, there have been political battles on many fronts, including mask and vaccine mandates and business and school closures.
Meanwhile, three effective COVID-19 vaccines have been rolled out, one of which has been fully authorized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and the more contagious delta strain of the coronavirus has coincided with a third surge in cases, hospitalizations and deaths.
Currently, there are 1,159 COVID-19 patients in area hospitals, including 25 children.
Of those hospitalized, 365 patients are in intensive care units and 260 are on ventilators; those numbers remain well above the levels seen before the third surge. San Antonio-area hospitals remain stressed with 143 new admissions in the last day, with only 9 percent of staffed beds available.
Nirenberg said public health officials are trying to reach people who remain unvaccinated.
The City Council on Thursday approved giving unvaccinated residents $100 H-E-B gift cards for getting vaccinated.
As of Wednesday, the COVID-19 death toll in Texas was 57,238.
This week, Metro Health reported 51 deaths that occurred within the past 14 days in Bexar County.
However, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that 165 deaths were recorded within the past seven days by local and state health departments, a 13 percent increase from the week before.
Metro Health officials have said the number of COVID-19 deaths in Bexar County reported by the state is often higher than actual because it will include a person from another county in Bexar’s death toll if that person dies in a hospital here.
Globally, more than 4.6 million people have died from COVID-19, including at least 652,480 people in the U.S.