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The anticipated post-Thanksgiving surge is starting to reveal itself in the Austin region's COVID-19 caseload and hospitalization data, leading to worsening projections around how the virus will spread in the coming weeks.
"We certainly are seeing an increase," Austin-Travis County Interim Health Authority Dr. Mark Escott said Wednesday.
Case investigations have revealed that many of the newer cases date back to the holiday
"We are hearing story after story after story about families who gathered during Thanksgiving," Austin Public Health Chief Epidemiologist Janet Pichette said.
Over the last week, the number of new COVID-related hospital admissions recorded in the Austin metro has increased steadily, with a more significant jump in the last couple days.
On Wednesday, 47 people were admitted to hospitals in the five-county area with the virus, bringing the seven-day moving average to 37, according to APH data. Last week, that average was 30.
There has also been an increase in the number of patients requiring intensive care while hospitalized.
"We are concerned," Escott said. "This is about the time we expect to see the hospital side of things start to be more significantly impacted."
What's ahead?
The growing number of hospitalizations doesn't bode well for future projections.
Immediately following Thanksgiving, the COVID-19 Modeling Consortium at the University of Texas at Austin projected a declining number of cases in the coming weeks. This may have been because of an increased demand for testing in the week before Thanksgiving, which lowered the positivity rate.
But now the consortium's model projects a worsening pandemic locally.
(COVID-19 Modeling Consortium at the University of Texas at Austin)
So, too, does the model used by the PolicyLab at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, which was updated on Wednesday.
"More areas of Texas are also beginning to realize the winter surge, with Houston, San Antonio and Austin leading the way in case incidence growth," PolicyLab researchers wrote in a blog post announcing their findings.
In other news
Despite the increase in cases and hospitalizations, there are reasons for Austinites to feel hopeful.
Travis County is doing better than any other large county in Texas when it comes to mitigating disease spread, which Escott attributed to residents' commitment to protective measures such as masking and social distancing.
Hospitals are also better at caring with COVID patients now than they were during the last surge period, in June and July. Data shows both the case fatality and ICU occupancy rates have improved over the same period thanks to better treatment options and more familiarity with the virus.
"That doesn't mean we shouldn't be careful," Escott said Tuesday. "But our hospitals are in good shape locally."
Additionally, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is expected to approve an emergency use authorization for Pfizer's COVID vaccine on Thursday.
Local health officials have said Austin's priority populations—including nursing home residents, first responders and front-line healthcare workers—will begin receiving the vaccine as soon as next week.
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(Pexels)
Our 15-year-old granddaughter and her sister, 12, have spent summer weeks with us, usually separately so that we could better get to know each individually. In visits focused on Austin and Port Aransas, the girls seemed to be developing an affection for Texas.
Houston and Dallas are two great American cities, the 4th and 9th largest, each loaded with cultural treasures, each standing in glittering and starchy contrast to Austin’s more louche, T-shirts and shorts ways.
Three hours up I-35, Dallas loomed before us as a set of gray skyscrapers in a filmy haze, accessed only through a concrete mixmaster of freeways, ramps and exits. I drove with false confidence. Be calm, I said to myself, it will all end in 10 minutes under the hotel entrance canopy. And it did.
The pool at the Crescent Court Hotel in Dallas. (Crescent Court Hotel)
We stayed three nights at the Crescent Court Hotel ($622 a night for two queens), a high-end hotel in Uptown, patronized by women in white blazers, business people in suits, and tall, lean professional athletes, their shiny Escalades and Corvettes darting in and out, and other celebrities like Bill Barr, the former attorney general who shoe-horned his ample self into a Toyota.
Each morning as I walked to Whole Foods for a cappuccino, a fellow identified by a bellman as Billy the Oilman arrived in his Rolls Royce Phantom. Where does he park? “Wherever he wants to. He likes the Starbucks here.”
We garaged our more modest set of wheels for the visit. We were chauffeured for tips by Matt Cooney and Alfonza “The Rev” Scott in the hotel’s black Audi sedan. They drove us to museums, restaurants and past the enclaves of the rich and famous. In Highland Park, The Rev pointed out the homes of the Dallas Cowboys' Jerry Jones and Troy Aikman along with the family compound of the Hunts, oil and gas tycoons.
The Dallas Museum of Art’s “Cartier and Islam” exhibit (until Sept. 18) attracted an older crowd; the nearby Perot Museum of Nature and Science was a powerful whirlpool of kids’ groups ricocheting from the Tyrannosaurus Rex to the oil fracking exhibit. Watch your shins.
A Geogia O'Keeffe oil painting called "Ranchos Church, New Mexico" at the Amon Carter Museum of Modern Art. (Rich Oppel)
For us, the best museum was the Amon Carter Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth, a 50-minute, madcap drive away via a 75 mph toll lane along I-30. Don’t try it during rush hour. The Carter has an exquisite collection of Remington paintings and sculptures and an excellent array of 19th and 20th-century paintings as well. Pick one museum? The Amon Carter. Peaceful, beautiful, uncrowded, free admission and small enough to manage in two hours.
The Fort Worth Stockyards, a place of history (with a dab of schmaltz), fun and good shopping, filled one of our mornings. The 98 acres brand the city as Cowboy Town, with a rodeo and a twice-daily (11:30 a.m. and 4 p.m.) cattle drive. We shopped for boots, drank coffee and watched the “herd” of 18 longhorns. So languid was their progress that if this were a real market drive the beef would have been very tough and leathery before it hit the steakhouse dinner plate.
The cattle drive at the Fort Worth Stockyards. (Rich Oppel)
But we could identify: the temperature was 97. “I saw a dog chasing a cat today,” said the emcee, deploying a very old joke. “It was so hot that both were walking.”
With limited time, we chose three very different restaurants:
- Nobu, in the Crescent Court Hotel; Jia, a modern Chinese restaurant in Highland Park; and Joe T. Garcia’s in Fort Worth. Nobu’s exotic Japanese menu set us back $480, with tip, for four (we had a guest), but it was worth it.
- Jia was an ordinary suburban strip mall restaurant, but with good food and a reasonable tab of $110 for four.
- Joe T.’s is an 85-year-old Fort Worth institution (think Matt’s El Rancho but larger), a fine Mexican restaurant where a meal with two drinks was $115.
Sushi at high-end restaurant Nobu. (Crescent Hotel)
It was all a splurge for a grandchild’s visit. Now we will get back to our ordinary road trips of Hampton Inns, where a room rate is closer to the Crescent Court’s overnight parking rate of $52. And to corner cafes in small towns.
Did Dallas change our 15-year-old’s view of Texas? “Yes. I think it’s a lot cooler than I did. The fashion, the food.” So, not only Austin is cool. Take Texas as a whole. It’s a big, complex, diverse and wonderful state.
