Gatherings like sporting events and festivals where large numbers of people are packed together still could be six months to a year away, interim Austin-Travis County Health Authority Dr. Mark Escott said Wednesday.

His assessment came a day after he warned Austin City Council members that reopening the local economy too soon, or without adequate safeguards to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, could result in a return to more stringent social distancing orders for a longer period of time.

"I think a baseline expectation should be that this concept of social distancing, the personal hygiene, the public masking or public facial covering is going to have to continue until we reach herd immunity by one method or another, and that would be primarily through a vaccination," Escott said.

Health officials however, don’t expect a coronavirus vaccine to be publicly available for at least a year, he said, so efforts to continue to decrease the transmission rate in local communities will have to continue.

Escott said models and predictions for the spread of the virus show the heart of the risk lies in physical interactions in the community.

"So if there are events, like sporting events, like festivals, where there are lots of person-to-person interactions, particularly within 6 feet, particularly when it’s people who are not related, that’s going to substantially increase the risk," Escott said. "I can expect that at least for the next six months, and perhaps the next year, that events like that are going to be very, very difficult to have unless we have substantial increases in testing and other strategies to further mitigate the threat of those kinds of events."

After orders from Gov. Greg Abbott to reopen state parks for day use, allow some nonessential medical procedures to continue and reopen all businesses for to-go retail services last week, local governments have begun wrestling with what reopening the local community could look like, albeit with caution.

But when that will happen still seems far off. On Tuesday night, health officials reported an increase of 59 confirmed coronavirus cases since Sunday, raising the total in Travis County to 1,233 cases and 27 deaths.

Escott said Travis County is waging a focused war on the virus at nursing homes and long-term health care facilities where some of the most vulnerable people live after outbreaks began taking hold at eight such facilities, accounting for all but one of the nine clusters of cases health workers are investigating.

The total number of infections at nursing homes included 96 residents and 67 staff members, 35 of them from one facility. Additionally, 15 residents of nursing homes and one health care worker have died from the virus, which accounts for more than half of the deaths reported in Travis County so far.

"This is very concerning for us, it’s concerning for us as a country, and we have to do better," Escott said.

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