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Healing
Houston-area COVID hospitalizations high 1,000 for first time in over 2 months
28
Dec
Dec
After months of steady declines in the number of COVID-19 hospitalizations in the Houston area, the state now reports that 1,054 people were being treated in Houston-area facilities on Sunday.
This marks the first time Houston’s hospitals have treated more than 1,000 people since Oct. 15, as the delta wave tapered off. On that day, there were 1,100 people hospitalized for COVID; it dropped to 938 the following day.
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The recent increase in hospitalizations is dramatic: The previous Sunday, DSHS reported that 597 people were hospitalized for COVID in the Houston area, a week-over-week increase of 77 percent. The surge corresponds with the rapid spread of the highly-transmissible omicron variant, which first appeared in South Africa in late November, and has swelled to account for more than 90 percent of local cases in recent weeks.
Houston’s hospitalizations are still well below their delta peak, which reached 3,500 on Aug. 24. But less than a week after Houston logged its 300,000th case of COVID, data from the Texas Medical Center shows that local transmission is increasing at a steady rate.
Researchers use a figure known as the rate of transmission to gauge how likely an infected person is to spread their illness to others. That rate for the average seasonal flu is about 1.28, meaning each infected person can be expected to spread the virus to slightly more than one other person.
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On Monday, the Texas Medical Center reported that the rate of transmission for COVID across the Houston area was 1.87; the average for the previous week was 1.58. This means that every person who has the virus can be expected to spread it to nearly two people.
maggie.gordon@chron.com
