Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on March 8, 2022

AUSTIN Texas is on its way down from the omicron surge with cases and hospitalizations nearing pre-variant numbers, according to Texas Department of State Health Services data.

Omicron a highly contagious but less severe variant of COVID-19 hit Texas in late November. It quickly spread throughout the state sending cases and hospitalizations skyrocketing, peaking by mid-January.

The rapid decrease in cases nationwide led the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to update its definitions of community spread and significantly relax its mask guidelines, adding that as of March 3 more than 90% of the U.S. population is in a location with low or medium COVID-19 community spread.

Now, cities and states across the country are relaxing mitigation practices with nearly every state abandoning indoor masking requirements.

We're definitely seeing favorable trends across the state, said Dr. Jennifer Shuford, chief Texas epidemiologist. We're seeing cases decrease and we're seeing fewer people hospitalized with COVID-19, so those are all really good signs.

At the height of the omicron surge, more than one in three molecular COVID tests returned positive, with the state reporting as many as 60,000 new cases per day, a record that more than doubled earlier pandemic numbers. Now, fewer than 5% of tests are returning positive results and the state is reporting fewer than 2,300 new cases per day.

While omicron cases surged and broke records, hospitalizations during the course of the variant reached previous peaks but never surpassed them, according to state data.

As of March 3, Texas reported 3,199 hospitalizations with the University of Texas at Austin COVID-19 Modeling Consortium projecting about 1,000 hospitalizations by the end of the month. Right before the start of the omicron surge, Texas reported about 2,600 hospitalizations in late November.

If the projected trend continues, Texas could report lower covid hospitalizations than last summer, which had the lowest number of hospitalizations since the start of the pandemic.

Dr. Nikhil Bhayani is a Texas Health infection prevention physician. He said hospitals in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, where he is located, are no longer being stretched but that only time will tell on whether any decisions to reduce recommendations were the right ones.

I just hope that these trends continue downwards and people do their part in terms of getting vaccines and being mindful and respectful of others and being vigilant, Bhayani said.

Shuford added that while some areas have emerged from the brunt of the surge, that is not the case everywhere. The current status of hospitalizations is still putting pressure on health care providers across the state, and Shuford warned that Texas has not yet reached the lowest points it has seen during the pandemic.

Our hospitals still have a lot of COVID-19 patients in them and anytime that another cause for hospitalizations might surge, say influenza, then we risk stressing our hospitals, Shuford said. We're hoping that the number of people with COVID-19 in the hospital will decrease even further so that we really have capacity in our hospitals for patients with other conditions.

Texas did hit tragic milestones over the course of the omicron surge adding approximately 13,000 more deaths between mid-November and late-February. The state went from as few as 60 deaths per day to as many as 240 deaths in late January, surpassing 75,000 deaths in early January. As of March 4, the state reported nearly 84,000 total COVID deaths since the start of the pandemic.

Shuford added that while the low number of cases is hopeful, the state is not out of the woods yet as a new sub-variant of omicron, known as BA.2, has overtaken the original omicron variant. It too is highly transmissible, she said.

It is important for us to understand the dynamics of the pandemic and prepare our communities and live in our communities accordingly, Shuford said. We know that a lot of people have already been vaccinated and boosted and a lot of people have already been infected, so there is some level of immunity in many people through our population. We are hopeful that that will protect a large proportion of our population against really severe outcomes from COVID-19 including hospitalization and death.

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Texas makes its way out of the omicron surge - Palestine Herald Press

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