Fort Bend County, TX – County Judge KP George announced that the county has updated its website with all available race and ethnicity data for residents of Fort Bend County who have tested positive for COVID-19. The data will be updated daily when new reports are received.
“I am committed to transparency and that means releasing data about the novel coronavirus cases accurately and quickly,” said County Judge KP George. “I ask everyone of all ages, genders, races and areas in Fort Bend to help stop the spread of this virus in our county by social distancing, hand washing and wearing masks in public places.”
CURRENT DATA: The race and ethnicity COVID-19 breakdown as of today (4/21/20) is on the websites and shows this data: Of the confirmed cases with race and ethnicity reported, 34% are Black, 22% are Hispanic, 21% are Asian, 19% are White and 4% are other. The total deaths are 18 and of those, 9 were White, 4 were Hispanic, 3 were Asian and 2 were Black.
REPORTING METHODOLOGY: Fort Bend County receives reports of notifiable diseases from multiple sources, which include hospitals, doctors and laboratories. The reports have varying amounts of information on them. Up to now, Fort Bend has posted the data from the reports online for gender, age and zip code. The County did not initially report the race and ethnicity online because not all the reports have that information. However, due to the heightened national interest in race and ethnicity data, Fort Bend County has begun adding that information to its online hub daily.
REPORTING DETAILS: The county’s health department is working with various reporting sources to go backwards and capture as much of the race and ethnicity information as possible for all the reported cases. The additional case data will be updated on the website as it is received, with two caveats. There is a lag in reporting cases across the country so the information can be for older cases. Secondly, the data on the county website will likely never equal 100 percent of cases because some reports don’t include race and ethnicity.
To learn more about the health issues related to coronavirus (COVID-19) in Fort Bend County, please visit fbchealth.org/ncov
