'Get vaccinated to avoid a holiday spike': Harris County lowers COVID-19 threat level

Harris County officially lowered its COVID-19 threat from a system high red level to a peg lower orange level threat on Nov. 3.

"We’ve been seeing a significant drop in new COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations,” Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo said in a post to Facebook. “But we’re not out of the woods and the rate of improvement is slowing down. Get vaccinated to avoid a holiday spike.”

Click2Houston reports Hidalgo stressed to residents she’s convinced nothing about the decrease in cases has come about by happenstance.

“Over the past several weeks, we’ve seen an encouraging drop in the number of new COVID-19 cases and our hospital population,” she added. “This didn’t happen by coincidence – it happened because of our community’s hard work to step up and increase our vaccination rates. That said, we’re not out of the woods. The decreases in our trends are slowing down while other communities are starting to see spikes, and as we learn to coexist with this virus over the long term we can’t grow complacent.”

Back in August as infection rates surged, Hidalgo placed the county under the highest COVID-19 threat, which ABC 13 News added also included advising unvaccinated people to stay home except for essential reasons, such as grocery shopping.

According to the county’s COVID-19 data hub, threat level 2 indicates a significant and “uncontrolled level” of virus infections across the county.