COVID-19 cases plummet in Wichita County

WICHITA FALLS, Texas (KAUZ) - Health officials monitoring daily COVID-19 cases are happy to report a decrease in new cases across Wichita County.

“To go from 2,000 cases in mid-January to being where we are today at 128, the level by which those cases have dropped is astonishing,” Amy Fagan, assistant director of the Wichita Falls - Wichita County Public Health District, said.

Fagan knows firsthand how quickly cases in the county rise and fall.

“Death and hospitalization are what we call lag indicators and we expect them to decrease even more in about two weeks, and we’ll continue to see a decline and see deaths decline,” Fagan said.

For now, she said these low numbers give them and their staff a chance to breathe, but they never stop being on the lookout for new threatening variants.

“What I’ve learned in this last surge of omicron is that once a variant is declared a variant of concern, then that’s when we get super concerned. That’s what happened with delta, that’s what happened with omicron. So right now I’m not seeing any cause for concern and I haven’t heard of any variants for concern,” Fagan said.

Fagan also said it will be left up to the state of Texas when we can stop calling COVID-19 a pandemic and call it an endemic.

“Will it just be something we monitor as we do for influenza and influenza-like illness? So it’ll be curious what our state leaders decide to do and how we’ll proceed from there,” Fagan said.

For more information on COVID-19 in Wichita County, visit their website.

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