TRI-COUNTY — The graph above shows coronavirus case and death counts for Presidio, Brewster and Jeff Davis counties, as well as for Ojinaga, a Mexican city bordering Presidio County, and Sul Ross State University in Alpine. The United States data is from the Texas Department of State Health Services and is current as of Tuesday, September 29. The data on Sul Ross State University is from the school’s online COVID tracker, and the figures for Ojinaga come from the Chihuahua State government and are up-to-date as of Monday, September 28.
County officials in Presidio and Brewster counties are reporting higher numbers of total cases than the state. As The Big Bend Sentinel has previously reported, there are often discrepancies in case counts from local and state officials, either because state officials have not yet updated their numbers or because they are unsure whether a case should be classified in the region. State officials also do not include probable cases in their data, which local officials sometimes do.
For data purposes, readers might assume that cases at Sul Ross State University are a subset of Brewster County’s cases — but that isn’t necessarily true. At an Alpine City Council meeting in September, Ekta Escovar, then-the local health authority for Brewster County, explained that state officials typically count college students at their
their permanent address (where their parents live) over their temporary address (where they’re living for college). That means, for example, that a Sul Ross student from Marfa would be counted in Presidio County rather than Brewster.
That logic made sense, Escovar said, because the state didn’t want to double-count cases and because many college students across the state are currently taking remote classes. Still, she felt it was important for Brewster County to track cases at Sul Ross, because those students typically live, eat and shop in Alpine. That’s another likely reason why Brewster County’s own numbers are often higher than the state’s.
Sul Ross State University provides information on total and active case counts. To calculate the number of recovered patients, The Big Bend Sentinel is subtracting the number of deaths and active cases from the total number of cases. But “recovered” in this case does not mean a patient is completely symptom-free or does not have any chronic issues. Rather, it just means that a patient is no longer contagious and that health workers no longer consider their coronavirus infection to be “active.”
Brewster County’s active case count has plummeted in recent months, a sign that Alpine has largely recovered from an outbreak in late June and early July. Presidio County’s numbers, meanwhile, don’t capture the fact that, so far, a disproportionate amount of its deaths have come from the town of Presidio.
