had an average TB incidence of 8.4 cases per 100,000 people — more than double that of the state overall, and nearly triple the national rate.
Lopez said his county’s tuberculosis department usually gets around 40 to 60 patients a year. “And then, all of a sudden, we went down to 20 during the COVID pandemic,” he said. Hidalgo County, which neighbors Cameron to the west, experienced a similar trend in 2020, when its number of confirmed TB cases was cut in half from the previous year, dropping from 71 cases to 36, according to Jeanne Salinas, tuberculosis program manager of the county health department. The county also performed hundreds fewer TB tests.
Convincing people of the need to test for TB was difficult even before COVID-19, Lopez said. For starters, some health workers wrongly considered the illness a nonissue. That tuberculosis and COVID-19 share similar symptoms became another complication. When doctors and other health professionals saw those symptoms, their first concern was COVID-19. And for a while, it was their only concern.