West Texas is in the middle of a still-growing measles outbreak with 505 cases reported on Tuesday. The state expanded the number of counties in the outbreak area this week to 10. The highly contagious virus began to spread in late January and health officials say it has spread to New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas and Mexico.
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00:00if you think about what the case fatality ratio is for measles we shouldn't be having three deaths
00:12with 600 cases that would probably equal out to 3 000 cases so just recognize that our that our
00:19number we have a severity bias here there's a bias in the numbers we're not getting the full
00:23picture here because there's lack of diagnostic testing people not coming forward to be tested
00:27so i anticipate we're going to see that see more cases and because there's just more people with
00:34measles that are not in the official numbers unfortunately last week we actually had measles
00:39enter a daycare and we've been working really hard with that daycare owner to make sure that
00:44we're excluding children that are unvaccinated and then also trying to encourage those additional
00:49vaccines for the other children in the center we're currently at six or seven cases in that facility
00:57but we do have more kids that are undergoing testing so i think that outbreak will grow our
01:02big push over the next couple of weeks is really going to be vaccinations in lubbock really focusing
01:09on getting all of those young ones in hopefully being able to open some vaccine clinics seven days
01:16a week for a couple of weeks um to really increase that vaccine rate