UPDATE: Five new COVID-19 cases confirmed in Young County

Five new COVID-19 cases were confirmed in Young County, with one Wednesday night and four Thursday afternoon. There were also 12 questionable positives coming from a Young County nursing home, after the Texas National Guard tested residents and staff.

Dr. Pat Martin, Local Health Authority for Young County, posted Wednesday night, June 3, on Facebook that the results of the National Guard testing resulted in 12 positives at a nursing home.
Martin said that there has been some question about false positives in relation to the National Guard’s mass testing of nursing homes and that retesting would be done locally, as well as antibody testing. Martin confirmed Thursday afternoon that the results were, in fact, false positives.

“The National Guard came in without really any forewarnings to us and tested all the nursing home patients and employees, and they were all positive,” Martin said. “These are false positives. We now have confirmation from the state that these are false positives. Every single one of these tests that were done at this particular lab, almost all of them are positives, which is way out of proportion to anywhere else in the state. This also happened in Snyder, all the people shown to be positive, were later found to be negative. So we are disregarding all of those tests and repeating to confirm, but we are confident that those are all false positives. We do not think we have any cases in our nursing homes.”

Martin said Thursday the nursing homes in the area have done a great job of protecting and keeping the residents healthy and safe. He made an emphasis to say that none of the residents in the nursing homes have symptoms and would continue to re-test residents and employees.

“The nursing homes in Graham are safe and they have been extremely careful throughout this whole ordeal,” Martin said. “The nursing homes have gone above and beyond to try to be safe and careful. I hate that that happened, because that can hurt their reputation and they have been really good about being careful.”

Martin also added on Wednesday that there was an additional case related to the case that was confirmed Sunday, May 31.

“In addition (there) is one other positive test that came back today from local clinics,” Martin said. “This patient was in contact with the positive patient we had over the weekend. We are monitoring the situation and I will try to get information out as soon as possible. Please be careful and continue social distancing.”

On Thursday, Dr. Martin confirmed three more cases of COVID-19, again related to the May 31 case.

“Update on COVID19 in Young County. We have. Three more positives today. These are all PCR nasal swabs and all have had contact with the already known positive patient. This makes 5 positives in the past few days that were all contacts of each other,” Martin said. “This brings our county number to 9 cases with 5 that are active. We are pursuing aggressive contact tracing. All patients are being managed at home and are quarantined. If you are a contact of these patients please quarantine and get tested. Contacts are to quarantine for 2 weeks from the last time you were with the infected person. You are quarantined regardless of the result of your test.”

In a phone interview later in the afternoon Thursday, Martin said that Young County received another positive, totaling four on Thursday and six over the last five days.

“We kind of have rapidly changing stuff in Graham right now,” Martin said.

As more information becomes available on the nursing home cases, The Graham Leader will update this story.