Roxanna Miranda/The Rider Graphic
UTRGV reported three additional COVID-19 cases between Oct. 1 and 7, according to a university official.
Doug Arney, vice president for Administrative Support Services and chair of the Infectious Disease Committee at UTRGV, said among the three were two students and one staff member.
UTRGV updates the number of cases reported for campus individuals weekly through the Confirmed Cases Dashboard. The numbers on the website are provided by the university COVID-19 Response Team.
Arney said no UTRGV students were quarantined on campus the week of Oct. 1 to 7.
As previously reported by The Rider, UTRGV has provided 50 rooms in separate wings of the Casa Bella Apartments on the Brownsville campus and in the Village Apartments in Edinburg for quarantining students.
As of last Wednesday, UT Health RGV had administered 45,412 tests and 86,208 vaccine doses, according to the Confirmed Cases Dashboard on the UTRGV COVID-19 website.
Early last week, UT Health RGV announced that it would once again be distributing third/booster doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in Edinburg and Harlingen.
As of Oct. 11 the university had distributed 1,553 third doses of the Pfizer vaccine, according to Dr. Michael Dobbs, chief medical officer for UT Health RGV.
Dobbs said UT Health RGV has been distributing third doses to the immunocompromised for several weeks and recently began offering the booster to a broader group of people on Tuesdays in Edinburg and Wednesdays in Harlingen.
He said UT Health RGV is working to set up a site in Brownsville.
However, the demand for boosters has proven to not be as high as anticipated, according to Dobbs.
“Very likely, the lower demand for the third shot has to do with the fact that at this point, people can basically go anywhere and get it, Walmart, Walgreens, wherever,” he said. “Whereas, when we first started talking about vaccinations almost a year ago, it was an extremely scarce resource.”
The office of the executive vice president and provost, announced Oct. 11 that 83% of the UTRGV campus community who filled out the Vaccine Portal are fully vaccinated.
In other COVID-19 related news, Cameron and Hidalgo counties continue to see steady trends in cases.
Hidalgo County reported an additional 79 confirmed cases last Wednesday, raising the county’s total to 116,145, according to its website.
As of last Wednesday, the county reported three additional COVID-19 related deaths, raising its total to 3,395. All three individuals were unvaccinated.
Hidalgo County reported that it is 79% fully vaccinated for individuals 12 and older as of last Tuesday, according to the Texas Health and Human Services website.
Last Tuesday, Cameron County Public Health reported an additional 42 COVID-19 cases, raising its total to 52,777.
Cameron County also reported one additional COVID-19-related death of an unvaccinated individual, raising its death toll to 1,945.
Esmeralda Guajardo, Cameron County health administrator, said 81% of the county 12 years and older is fully vaccinated and 94% have received at least one dose.
“I do expect that at some point we are going to exceed the 100% vaccination rate, and the reason being is because the denominator that the state health department uses is based on the 2019 U.S. census numbers and so two things happened there,” Guajardo said. “We are in 2021 and the population always increases and the other thing is, not a lot of people completed the U.S. census.”
She said Cameron County has distributed 8,394 boosters to those eligible as of Oct. 6.
“We want to contain this and we want to end this pandemic and the only way to go about it is through vaccinations,” Guajardo said.
She said the county is waiting for guidance from the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who were scheduled to meet last week in reference to Moderna and Johnson & Johnson booster availability.
