Alarmed over public complacency, local health experts reminded Texans that the deadly virus from Wuhan, China, has remained a compelling reason to be cautious amid rising figures of infections in the Coastal Bend.
“The thing is, the increasing numbers are not a surprise,” renowned medical expert Dr Salim Surani said.
Citing government figures covering July 1-14, Surani said at least 300 cases of COVID-19 have been recorded in the area, even as he claimed that the number of contaminated persons decimated the number of vaccinated covering the same period.
“We are putting our guards down too close, and our vaccination rate is not that high,” Surani further averred.
The World Health Organization recently hinted at the emergence of a far more vicious mutated virus strain referred to as Delta variant, which reports had as extremely infectious.
Echoing Surani’s sentiment, Dr Mulukutla Ramakrishna, a Pediatrician for the Nueces County Medical Society, cited real-time situations in the United States.
“About twenty-five per cent of the cases in the United States are related to the Delta Variant. This Delta Variant is 60% more infective than the other variant.”
Ramakrishna also took note of the Delta variant as a mutated strain that could hardly be identified because an infected person does not lose the sense of taste or smell.
It, however, causes an infected person so much more pain and agony than what the original COVID-19 did at the onset of the pandemic.
“They have a serious sore throat, they have common cold symptoms, they have allergy symptoms, feeling tired, feverishness. But they don’t complain of loss of taste and loss of smell like the other one,” said Dr Ramakrishna.
Both Surani and Ramakrishna nonetheless said that Texans may resume to what they’ve been pre-occupied with before the pandemic — provided that people maintain physical distance and wear protective masks when interacting with others indoors.
