I remember around one year ago, I was challenged to explain why cases had continued to fall despite the Governor's early March Executive Order removing restrictions. Back then, Vaccination Rates were just being rolled out to Seniors and others with pre-existing conditions. The demand for shots was strong and everyone I knew was coming up with reasons they deserved to be in line. I admitted that there was much we did not know and continued to take a "conservative" approach to avoiding crowds and masking indoors. Little did we expect Delta and Omicron to overload our hospitals in two additional surges, that July and then five months later in December 2021.
Figure 1 shows that all of Texas finds itself well below values reported at this time last year (see red bar vs horizontal red line at 15 average Covid-19 Patient Hospitalizations per 100,000 population). Such results are just ahead of Florida (16) behind NY (14) and California (14). At the same time, despite such strong improvement in the number of Covid-19 hospitalized, those remaining are very sick, occupying limiting the number of available ICU beds. The TSA's with less than or equal to 5 beds are located in Wichita Falls [TSA-C], Abilene [TSA-D], San Angelo [TSA-K], Waco [TSA-M], and Bryan [TSA-N].
The takeaway is that while our numbers are going down, do not toss your N-95 masks. While we are all good to go in most of Texas, I would hesitate if I lived or was visiting any of the counties which fell in the above ICU-limited parts of the state. Once my Blog goes silent, I recommend visiting the site: https://covid-texas.csullender.com/?tsa=V for clear plots by TSA region. These can be pulled up quickly and the scales read more easily than those associated with Texas's DSHS, even though the latter is the source of the data.
For those of you outside of Texas, I recommend the CDC site; however, you will need to get familiar with it since at first glance, it can be overwhelming. Figure 2 below corresponds to the link with data that corresponds to the time I am writing this https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#new-hospital-admissions . Note how they divide the US into approximately 10 HHS regions as opposed to the 4 used by the Covid Tracking Project (or the 50 used by many of the Mainstream Media)
Remember to look at trends (time-series) on a per-capita basis if you plan to compare one place with another. If you are looking at snapshots, be sure to understand the context of the data in time: is it increasing or decreasing. Also, eyeball extremes and the average and relate this with the snapshot to assess how representative it is relative to it's time-stamp (or time-duration/exposure).
The Vaccination Table is provided in Figure 3 for completeness. For all practical purposes, it is unchanged compared to last week. Until 5-year-olds and younger are not eligible, I don't expect any of this to change. One year ago, we were hoping to achieve 70% Vaccination Rates. Unfortunately, Texas did not achieve this threshold even though the Border exceeded this milestone and is on target to pass 80% soon. We also learned that immunity fades after 5 months following the MRNA regimen. While Boosters serve to see that such Breakthrough infections are less severe and thus reduce the need for hospitalization, staffing shortages are the concern for the present (https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/workforce/13-states-experiencing-workforce-shortages-in-at-least-25-of-hospitals-23-anticipate-it.html ). While Texas is ranked 38, we know that shortages are not equally distributed throughout the state.
