By Brad Brooks and Andrew Hay
(Reuters) – Each day, hundreds of residents of Galveston County, Texas, are tested for the new coronavirus. Free diagnostic tests are being offered to anyone over the age of seven and the county has enough test kits to last a month.
Few U.S. counties are testing for the coronavirus as aggressively as Galveston, a county nearly as big as Rhode Island that stretches along the Texas Gulf Coast southeast of Houston. Health experts say residents there are being tested at a rate three times the national average.
As Texas prepares to lift some stay-at-home restrictions in early May, health and municipal authorities have moved beyond just testing those with symptoms to the more ambitious job of surveillance testing of the general population. That means attempting to trace every contact of a person found to be infected to quarantine them and contain the virus.
But like other counties across the country, it faces…
