CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — A lot has been said about the newest variant of the Coronavirus -- but officials at the health district have not yet detected the variant even amid a winter surge.
From long lines at testing centers, to hospitals and the health care systems, all are once again being stretched thin -- these are all things experts have predicted. Compared to last year, officials are seeing fewer hospitalizations per case, but a rise in hospitalizations overall. Experts foresee that as testing ramps up -- so too will the prevalence of new variants.
Dr. Chris Bird with the Informatics and Modeling team said that detecting a new variant locally might be harder than anticipated.
"The policy at the federal level is every county has to submit five percent of their samples for DNA or RNA sequencing," Bird said. "Now if you only have a few samples 5% is a very low number, and locally we're having maybe you know 20,30,50 a day and 5% of that is not a lot of samples, so you're very unlikely to detect a rare variant."
Over the weekend the health district reported over 700 positive cases. and the coastal bend is on the high end of new cases reported according to state data.
For the latest updates on coronavirus in the Coastal Bend, click here.
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