CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — The Texas Health and Human Services show that in nearly every category from the daily reported cases to fatalities, this surge has outpaced the one in July.
“We’ve also seen the hospitals are already expanding their capacity again,” said city-county health director Annette Rodriguez. “It makes it very hard for me to tell you exactly, you know, what percent the rat because they have that flexibility to expand and then contract back down.”
Of those state health and human service numbers for the Coastal Bend, we have a total of over 1,600 staffed hospital beds and around 550 available hospital beds with 46 open in the ICU.
“We are concerned about the surge and it’s a fact on our hospitalizations particularly with the numbers increasing we have also discussed how different it is you’ll recall in the summertime we did not have elective surgeries we have them now,” said Nueces County judge Barbara Canales.
Males make up nearly 64% of the COVID-19 cases and Hispanic people are 39 percent of those. Two groups of people who need to take extra precautions according to these statistics.
”I’m getting emails. I’m getting phone calls. People are asking why our numbers are going up,” said Rodriguez. “You know our numbers are going up because we are at re-open Texas phase 3 people are feeling more comfortable about being out and about. We have a lot more people that are out running around and yes, a lot of people are wearing masks. Kudos to them, but the problem is a lot of people are wearing them inappropriately.”
Rodriguez believes that our hospitals will be able to expand their capacity to hold more COVID-19 patients above and beyond what was called for in July. She’s just hoping that people will start wearing their mask to cover both their mouth and nose so that we won’t have to get to that point.