NUECES COUNTY, Texas — The COVID-19 hospitalization rate in Nueces County has been hovering around the 14-percent mark for several weeks now -- just a percentage below what it would take to automatically roll back parts of our local economy.
The latest numbers from the State Health and Human Services Department shows that the Coastal Bend is doing well handling COVID-19 compared to other nearby areas like the Valley and Laredo.
As of Thursday, Nueces County still had more than 500 hospital beds available with 27 of those being in the ICU.
In Laredo, however, there are only 13 hospital beds available and two of those are in the ICU. They have 468 people in their hospitals, and 252 of those are COVID-19 patients.
"48-percent of all of the hospital staff's hospital beds are filled with COVID patients, so we're at 14-percent so we're doing much better than Laredo is," said Dr. Chris Bird with the Coastal Bend's COVID-19 Task Force.
Dr. Emilie Prot is the Region 11 medical director and said the Laredo numbers look so much worse than ours simply because of the lack of healthcare facilities there.
"Laredo only has two acute care hospitals, and it is true they are at 48-percent hospital COVID capacity right now and we are working with the Texas Department of Emergency Management and our own DSHS up in Austin to support them," Dr. Prot said.
Dr. Prot said the surest way to bring down COVID-19 numbers everywhere is to vaccinate more people. She said the State is trying to get more vaccines.
"We definitely do have the request. There's more demand than there is supply," Dr. Prot said.
Last week at the Richard M. Borchard Fairgrounds, the Corpus Christi-Nueces County Public Health District was able to vaccinate nearly 10,000 people. That number sounds impressive until you hear Dr. Bird explain how much more there is to be done in order to stop the spread of COVID-19.
"Last week, 9,000 people were inoculated, and that's 1.5-percent of the Coastal Bend's population," Dr. Bird said. "It would take more than a year at that rate, so we have to go even faster."
As of Thursday, the health district has asked for 8,000 doses of the vaccine to be distributed next week, but there's no guarantee we will get them.
For the latest updates on coronavirus in the Coastal Bend, click here.
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