State and local groups help Texas deal with virus hot spots

KXAN:
Health, military and emergency management personnel are spread out across Texas to tackle COVID-19 clusters this weekend, the state’s emergency management chief said.

Those “surge response teams” are located in 60 communities around Texas to help with testing, medical supply delivery and sanitation, approximately five times the number of teams in the initial dispatch six weeks ago.

“We know right now that nursing homes, meatpacking plants and jails and prisons are the top three areas where we see outbreaks occur,” Chief Nim Kidd of the Texas Division of Emergency Management said. “What we’re trying to do — and doing with success — is getting into those locations, testing everybody in the facility. Trying to get a very rapid turnaround on those tests, which isn’t always as fast as I want it to be, and making sure that we take people that are positive and keep them together, and people that are negative and keep them together.”

Kidd uses a wildfire analogy to explain how the state approaches a community where there’s been an outbreak.

“We’ve evacuated the area, now we’re letting people back in, we know that we’re going to have hotspots, and we have these surge teams created to go and address those hotspots,” Kidd said.

“We are currently helping with the disinfecting of all of our nursing homes, trying to do our best to help everyone out,” Sergeant Diana Byrd, battle noncommissioned officer with the Army National Guard Joint Task Force 176, said in a video released by the Texas Military Department.

Gov. Greg Abbott said Friday the surge response teams are helping contain the spread of the novel coronavirus in Texas.

“Every time we have pushed these surge teams into hot zones, they’ve met with very good results,” Abbott said. “But what happens is over the first week you will see a massive increase in the amount of tests as well as the amount of the people who test positive, and then after about two weeks, you see a decline in both tests and those testing positive and you see a containment of the problem.”
...
It is a real focused operation.  Nursing homes have been one area of operation where they go in and test everyone and separate any who might be infected.  The teams have also gone into meat packing facilities.

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