Hospital officials worry that "staggering and frightening" hospitalization rates will push facilities to capacity at a time when staffing is short and workers are exhausted.
When Terry Scoggin left work at Titus Regional Medical Center in Mount Pleasant on Tuesday evening, there were five patients at the facility being treated for COVID.
Overnight, six more people suffering severe coronavirus infections were admitted to the rural Northeast Texas hospital pushing the facility to its capacity limit and putting Scoggin, the hospital's chief executive, on high alert for what he's calling "a fourth surge."
"We're at it again," Scoggin said.
That same night, hospitalizations in Bexar County rose by nearly 8%. Almost 100 people were admitted with severe COVID to local facilities on Tuesday alone, Bexar County officials said on Wednesday.
"These numbers are staggering and frightening," said Eric Epley, CEO of the Southwest Texas Regional Advisory Council for Trauma in San Antonio.
Hospital and health officials across Texas are seeing similar dramatic jumps, straining an already decimated health care system that is starving for workers in the aftermath of previous coronavirus surges.
In Travis and surrounding counties on Thursday, 314 patients were reported in area hospitals with COVID-19, a number not seen since late February.
In Dallas County, COVID hospitalizations have increased by 99% over the past two weeks, reaching 376 earlier this week. The local numbers are expected to hit between 800 and 1,000 by mid-August, according to forecasters at UT-Southwestern Medical Center.
Overall on Wednesday, Texas hospitals reported 5,292 patients hospitalized with COVID. A week earlier, COVID hospitalizations were 3,566. On July 1, it was 1,591.
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