Dr. Umair Shah talks about the challenges he’s facing in his new role.

For the most part, testing sites will be closed on Thanksgiving Day and Friday. Harris County Public Health made the announcement on Twitter to remind people.

“We’ve got a lot of road ahead in the next two months,” said Dr. Umair Shah, the executive director of the Harris county health department in Texas, where Houston is the biggest city. “You’ve got to be very, very methodical and thoughtful how public health departments are pulled into the spectrum, because our teams are stretched and have been stretched for months,” said Shah.

"[Harris County Public Health] visited the district two weeks ago to see our processes and watch how we were doing our contact tracing and just kind of evaluate our processes," Spring ISD Chief of Police Ken Culbreath said during the meeting. "The epidemiologist nurse that was here gave us a thumbs-up and said that we were on par with their standards, and in some areas, we even exceeded here in the district, so we were really proud of that.

While taking pains to credit the animal live release rate to all of the shelter’s 96 full-time employees and 492 enrolled volunteers, Eddie Miranda, senior public information officer for Harris County Public Health, said Pam Siedler has had a major impact. “Pam has been very effective in her approach to promoting our pets … and has her heart set on saving the animals,” he said.

Harris County Public Health has seen an increase in testing as the Thanksgiving holiday approaches—as much as 50 percent, according to Houston doctor Sherri Onyiego.

Harris County reported 3,341 new cases since Friday and is now at 183,252 cases total. There were 19 newly reported deaths in the Houston region since Friday, making the death toll 3,974.

Dr. Maria Rivera with Harris County Public said that the numbers of people getting tested have increased recently. “We’ve actually seen a substantial increase since Tuesday which was the day that [Harris County] Judge [Lina] Hidalgo sent the message to the public and we have seen our testing rates increase about 50% week by week,” said Dr. Rivera. She said she hopes that the trend will continue.

The guest speaker for the TSU College of Science, Engineering and Technology speaker was William Hudson, chief operating and financial officer for Harris Country Public Health and a TSU alumnus.

There’s a rush on COVID-19 testing ahead of Thanksgiving. Harris County Public Health has seen testing increased by 50%. “Actually, we have seen an increase in our testing demand," HCPH's Dr. Sherri Onyiego said.