I don’t know what else to say.
An El Paso resident’s two-day visit to Austin has prompted a warning from city public health officials, after the person was confirmed to have measles.
The person was in Austin from April 25 through April 27. Austin officials said El Paso’s Department of Public Health has gathered “limited details about the individual’s visit to Austin.”
However, the individual may have exposed the public at Terry Black’s Barbecue on Barton Springs Road on Saturday, April 26, between 8 a.m. and 11 p.m.
The city of Fredericksburg posted on its Facebook page that the same person may have exposed people in Gillespie County, also on April 26.
The city said the person visited four locations on East Main Street in downtown Fredericksburg:
- Burger Burger between 1:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.
- Loca on Main between 2:30 p.m. and 5 p.m.
- Felt Boutique and Allens Boots between 3:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.
More details on the Fredericksburg exposure can be found online here.
Additional locations may be identified as the case investigation continues. The city of Austin said updates will be posted at austintexas.gov/measles.
Austin health officials said in a media release that this case “underscores the importance of community-wide vaccination and awareness.”
Putting my cybersecurity hat on for a minute, one of the main entry points for malware on a computer or network is people doing the wrong thing. Clicking on links or attachments in phishing emails, downloading software from sketchy websites, allowing some “tech support agent” who called you out of the blue to say that they had detected a threat on your machine to install some remote connection tool so they can “fix” it for you, that sort of thing. Some of these threats are more sophisticated than others, and even highly knowledgeable people can fall for the right scam, but a lot of the time it’s just someone being extremely unaware. Many companies nowadays spend a lot of time and resources on employee training and phishing simulations to help their staff recognize these situations and reduce the risk of them becoming victimized.
All of this is a longwinded way of saying that one way to reduce the risk of measles transmission, given that some stubborn rump of the population refuses to get vaccinated and must be coddled for it, is to try to make these people aware of the fact that if they are actively sick, they need to stay home and not be around other people until they’re not sick anymore. I don’t know what it’s going to take to craft and deliver such a message to the people that need to hear it in a way that they will be receptive to it, but it’s clear from this story that the risk is real and we’ve gotta do something about it.
Anyway. Measles keeps finding its way to other states, though not all of that is connected to the ongoing outbreak. These new cases are almost always related to travel in some way, either as above a sick person visiting somewhere or a healthy but often unvaccinated person visiting a country – or now state – with an elevated risk of measles and getting themselves infected. I don’t have a whole lot of hope for any kind of travel safety communications happening given the current administration’s unhinged zeal for cutting funds for medical research, mostly as a way to attack its perceived ideological enemies. None of that is directly related to the measles outbreak, but it’s very much all of a piece, and we are all a lot worse off for it.
And that brings us to the Friday update.
The measles outbreak centered in northwest Texas appeared to slow on Friday, as health officials reported just seven new cases since earlier this week.
The latest update from the Texas Department of State Health Services shows the state has seen 709 measles cases since the outbreak began spreading in late January. So far, 89 people have been hospitalized for treatment and two children, an 8-year-old girl and a 6-year-old girl, died after contracting the virus.
Texas has reported 26 new measles cases over the past week, down from 37 new cases during the one-week period that ended May 2, according to DSHS data. The state had been reporting about 50 new cases of measles per week since Valentine’s Day, aside from a two-week surge in late March and early April.
Approximately two-thirds of cases in Texas have been in children and teens. More than 95% have been in individuals who have not received the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, or whose vaccination status is unknown.
The outbreak, the largest in the United States in at least 25 years, has also spread to New Mexico and Oklahoma. New Mexico reported 71 cases on Friday, while Oklahoma reported 17. New Mexico has reported one suspected measles death, an unvaccinated adult who tested positive for the virus after dying.
The DSHS estimated that fewer than 10 of the Texans who have contracted measles — about 1% of the total — are actively infectious. An individual may be infectious up to four days before a rash appears and up to four days after it’s gone.
Six of the seven new cases reported on Friday are in El Paso County. The county has now reported 50 cases in total.
The other new case is in Lamar County, which has reported 51 cases amid the outbreak.
For the second time in a week, the update did not include any new cases in Gaines County, which has been the epicenter of the outbreak. The small county along the New Mexico border has reported a total of 403 cases, nearly 57% of all cases associated with the outbreak.
The DSHS said there is ongoing measles transmission in eight counties: Cochran, Dallam, Dawson, Gaines, Lamar, Lubbock, Terry and Yoakum. Garza and Lynn counties are no longer considered to have ongoing measles transmission.
Okay, I’ll accept that the outbreak is slowing down. That just emphasizes my point about the need to keep the fairly small number of infectious people isolated, and especially not traveling through much more heavily populated areas, because that’s how you reignite this flame. NBC News gets into this a bit.
Ninety-one people have been hospitalized since the beginning of the outbreak. About two-thirds were kids.
But for the second week in a row, no children are hospitalized with the virus in West Texas, said Katherine Wells, the public health director for the city of Lubbock, located at the epicenter of the outbreak.
“I’m hopeful that things are slowing down,” Wells said.
Still, she and others who’ve been on the front lines of the outbreak were cautious.
“I don’t think it’s over, but I do think it’s beginning to taper a little bit now,” said Dr. Lara Johnson, a pediatrician and chief medical officer at Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock. “That could change tomorrow.”
Measles is so contagious, Johnson said, it can easily infiltrate vulnerable, mostly unvaccinated, communities. At this point, she said, it seems the virus has made its way through many West Texas communities with low vaccination rates.
“Outbreaks burn themselves out,” Johnson said. “Everyone who’s susceptible in the community becomes not susceptible, either because they have the illness, or perhaps they choose to vaccinate.”
Doctors on the ground said there’s been a slight uptick in people choosing to get themselves or their children vaccinated. Others have been convinced to stay home while contagious to prevent further spread.
Mostly, however, measles has likely run out of people to infect among the vulnerable population.
Even as the outbreak slows in West Texas, it’s growing elsewhere.
As of Tuesday, there were 987 measles cases nationwide, according to an NBC News tally of state health departments. It’s the largest number of measles cases since 2019, when more than 1,200 cases were reported, driven by an outbreak in Orthodox Jewish communities in New York.
Most of the current cases are related to international travel. Montana and North Dakota are now reporting eight and four cases, respectively.
But some of the outbreaks in other states are linked directly to cases in West Texas.
That includes the 46 cases in Kansas, not mentioned in the Chron story. By the way, the 403 total cases in Gaines County, which as noted hasn’t reported any new ones in two weeks, represents about 1.8% of that county’s population. A similar case rate in Harris County would have infected about 87,000 people. And this outbreak, whether it is truly waning or not, is still the biggest in the nation in 25 years. Let’s please not have a repeat of that any time soon.
NPR has another nice story on Katherine Wells, the indefatigable public health commissioner in Lubbock. I wish her a long, relaxing vacation when this is over. And to close on another positive note, here’s some more good news. Item one:
Far fewer babies went to the hospital struggling to breathe from RSV, a severe respiratory infection, after the debut of a new vaccine and treatment this season, according to an analysis published today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
RSV, or respiratory syncytial (sin-SISH-uhl) virus, is the leading cause of hospitalization for infants in the US. An estimated 58,000–80,000 children younger than 5 years old are hospitalized each year. Newborns—babies between 0 and 2 months—are the most at risk of being hospitalized with RSV. The virus circulates seasonally, typically rising in the fall and peaking in the winter, like many other respiratory infections.
But the 2024–2025 season was different—there were two new ways to protect against the infection. One is a maternal vaccine, Pfizer’s Abrysvo, which is given to pregnant people when their third trimester aligns with RSV season (generally September through January). Maternal antibodies generated from the vaccination pass to the fetus in the uterus and can protect a newborn in the first few months of life. The other new protection against RSV is a long-acting monoclonal antibody treatment, nirsevimab, which is given to babies under 8 months old as they enter or are born into their first RSV season and may not be protected by maternal antibodies.
Item two:
In the summer of 2020, death engulfed Texas’ Rio Grande Valley.
Delia Ramos recalls the eerie prevalence of freezer trucks lining hospital parking lots to store the bodies, as a novel virus battered the mostly Hispanic region. When her husband Ricardo eventually fell ill, he entered the hospital alone, and she never got to see him again.
The demand for services for the dead was so high, she had to place her name on a waiting list to have him cremated.
“People were passing away left and right,” said Ramos, 45, of Brownsville.
By that summer’s end, it was clear: Texas Hispanics were dying at a rate faster than any other ethnic group. In 2020, Hispanics made up nearly half of all COVID deaths in Texas. White Texans — whose share of the state’s population is the same as Hispanics — made up only 38% of all deaths that year.
In the Valley and in several Hispanic communities, many Texans like Ramos’ husband, who was a driver for a transportation contractor, worked in jobs outside the home, exposing them to the deadly virus. They often lived under the same roof with children and grandparents, increasing the risk of spreading the infection.
“What we’re seeing really is historic decimation among the Hispanic community by this virus,” said Dr. Peter Hotez, Texas’ reigning infectious disease expert and physician, to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus on Sept. 30, 2020.
It has been five years since Gov. Greg Abbott issued a series of orders reopening the state for business in May 2020 — a move that accelerated a disproportionate amount of deaths for Texas Hispanics in the immediate months that followed. Today, COVID deaths have fallen dramatically.
An analysis of COVID mortality data by The Texas Tribune reveals the trends have flipped since the beginning of the pandemic: White Texans are the most likely to die of COVID compared to other race and ethnic groups, while the proportion of Hispanics dying of the disease has plummeted. In 2024, Hispanics made up 23% of COVID deaths in Texas, while white Texans made up 63%.
Vaccines work, y’all. Try them, you won’t be disappointed.
