Dallas County

Dallas County Reports 3 COVID-19 Deaths Friday With 255 New Cases

Higher than normal number of cases expected to continue this week as the state works through a reporting backlog

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The Dallas County Health Department is reporting three more confirmed COVID-19 deaths Friday along with 255 new cases of the virus. Meanwhile, the county's 7-day average dropped for the second-straight day.

The county is reporting three deaths, all confirmed, including:

  • A woman in her 50s who was a resident of Grand Prairie. She had been critically ill in an area hospital and did have underlying high-risk health conditions.
  • A man in his 60s who was a resident of Garland. He had been critically ill in an area hospital and had underlying high-risk health conditions.
  • A man in his 80s who was a resident of a long-term care facility in Dallas. He died in hospice care and had underlying high-risk health conditions.

Dallas County Health and Human Services reported an additional 714 cases of the virus Friday, but only 255 of them were new. The remaining cases were part of the backlog reported by the Texas Department of State Health Services including 439 from June, 15 from July and five from earlier this month.

The additional cases dropped the county's 7-day average from 1478 cases per day to 1,453 cases per day; the 14-day average went up, however, from 993 cases per day to 1,014 cases per day. Late last week the averages were both around 500 cases per day, but the backlog of cases being released by the state has increased those averages.

"We continue to see a good trend with the number of new, positive cases," said Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins. "We are seeing a good trend due to masking, social distancing, hand washing and avoiding unnecessary trips and gatherings with people outside your immediate family who are unmasked. We must continue this in order to have fewer illnesses, more businesses remain open, and our children back to school sooner rather than later."

Both Jenkins and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said earlier this week that counties should expect to have several more days of "discovered, backlogged cases" before the reporting normalizes. Of the backlogged cases, Jenkins said the patients did receive the results of their COVID-19 test, but that information was lost in the state's system and no tracing was done.

On Tuesday, Gov. Greg Abbott said the state and private labs have made changes to fix lags in reporting and that he has more confidence than ever that the accounting of the numbers being reported by the state are accurate.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott addressed the backlog of COVID-19 cases coming out of the Texas Department of State Health Services Tuesday saying the problems underlying the need for the adjustments have been solved and that he has more confidence in the accounting than ever before.

The county has now accumulated 67,486 cases of the virus since testing began in March. With an estimated 49,493 recoveries being reported by the state through Friday, there are also an estimated 17,143 active cases in Dallas County. There have been 849 confirmed deaths attributed in the county to the virus, which, according to Dallas County Health and Human Services Director Dr. Philip Huang, is now the third leading cause of death in the county behind diseases of the heart and cancers. Since March 20, the date of the first reported COVID-19 related death in Dallas County, the county has averaged 5.5 deaths per day.

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