Texas - Houston - heads up!
Houston hasn’t reported a surge of coronavirus cases. But its hospitals tell a different story.
The 25-county region surrounding Houston had reported fewer than 950 confirmed coronavirus cases among its 9.3 million residents as of Monday. But on that same day, there were 996 people hospitalized in the region with confirmed or suspected cases of COVID-19, according to the advisory council count. That figure is not cumulative and does not include patients with COVID-19 who were hospitalized and released before Monday.
Dr. Peter Hotez, an infectious disease expert and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said the disconnect between the number of positive test results and the number of people hospitalized for COVID-19 suggests that a significant majority of coronavirus cases are going undetected here.
“We know that about 1 in 5 or 1 in 10 COVID-19 patients needs to be hospitalized, so what you’re seeing in hospital admissions would suggest that the actual number of cases could be 5 to 10 times higher in Texas than what’s been reported to this point,” he said.
NBC News:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/houston-hasnt-reported-a-surge-of-coronavirus-cases-but-its-hospitals-tell-a-different-story/ar-BB127eMv?ocid=spartanntp
Los Angeles - here it comes
The next couple weeks will be an intense period in the coronavirus pandemic in Los Angeles.
Los Angeles County has ramped up testing, and is very likely to begin identifying 1,000 new cases per day as early as next week... the number of cases has held steady in recent days, a sign that social distancing is working.
The spread of the disease has begun making its way through the county’s nursing homes, treatment facilities and jails. Currently, county health officials are investigating outbreaks in 67 institutional settings where 321 staff members and residents have been sickened.
cases: 4,566
hospitalized: 1,018 (22%)
lost: 89 (1.9%)
The low numbers are because TX isn’t testing much. In my county, we had a drive thru test tent a couple weeks ago but it was only for healthcare workers so imagine it is the same everywhere. Our dept. of health person says of the 3 confirmed cases, she knows of a dozen more for each of those but they aren’t in the official counts because she can’t test them.
Bottom line, whatever the official CDC number is add another zero or two.