Bandera’s vaccination rate lowest of surrounding counties

Of all the surrounding counties, Bandera County’s vaccination rate is the lowest, with 44.14 percent of the county listed as fully vaccinated, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS).

DSHS lists the same age demographic in the surrounding counties as follows: Bexar County at 63.49 percent, Kendall County at 62.2 percent, Kerr County at 48.07 percent, Real County at 46.93 percent, Uvalde County at 62.41 percent and Medina County at 60.14 percent.

Vaccination rates are higher in all the aforementioned counties for those age five and up who have received one dose. Bandera’s 49.86 percentage rate for that demographic is also the lowest in the surrounding counties.

DSHS listed 77 active cases of COVID-19 in Bandera County as of Sunday, before dropping that count to 66 as of Monday afternoon. This time last week, DSHS listed an active case count of 13.

No new deaths were reported in the county, according to DSHS.

As of Monday, no COVID-19 cases in Texas have been attributed to the recently discovered omicron variant, which the CDC said was first detected in mid November in samples collected in Botswana and South Africa before first being detected in the United States on December 1.

The CDC has not announced how severe or contagious the new variant is.

Statewide, the number of new cases of COVID-19 in the past week rose to 30,201, the highest level reported by the Coronavirus Resource Center at Johns Hopkins University since October.

DSHS says 55 percent of Texas’s total population is fully vaccinated.